Tool For Assessing Your Communications
Spitfire consults with nonprofits on communications and issue campaign planning. But don’t stop reading if you’re a fundraiser! If you’re a fundraiser, at the core of what you do is delivering effective messages to the right people, right?
Spitfire has developed an intriguing ‘self-help’ tool called Smartscan that you can use to assess the strength and vulnerabilities of your organization’s communications.
This online tool walks you through a series of questions — in a serious, comprehensive, but nicely cheeky manner — in four areas:
- Identity — How clear is your brand?
- Planning — How prepared are you to communicate effectively?
- Best Practices — Do you have the right knowledge and skills?
- Rules & Results — How do you measure success?
To use Smartscan effectively, you need to do some advance preparation and identify some other participants to furnish reactions. And then you can self-administer the four modules (including pausing, saving and resuming) at your own pace. Spitfire estimates you’ll need two hours or so (plus the advance homework).
Once you’ve completed a module, you get detailed advice pertinent to your responses.
I walked through two of the modules just to play a bit and see what quality of counsel I would receive from Smartscan.
It’s indeed smart stuff. Obviously it needs to be a bit generic, but still, it points you in smart directions. The folks behind the tool clearly know what they’re talking about. And although I don’t know them, I like their style.
If you’re working at Oxfam or The American Cancer Society, your communications and communications team would — I hope — already be in synch with the advice proffered by Smartscan. But if you’re on the smaller side of the nonprofit continuum, I suspect you’d find Smartscan quite helpful.
Tom
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