Online Communications Strategy and Skills
Communicating online as an organization is always challenging, from designing strategy and process to acquiring and building hard and soft skills.
Aspiration is passionate about sharing best practices that drive both strategy and sustainability. Our objective is to make ourselves “obsolete” as quickly as possible in these engagements, giving organizations the tools they need to self-manage their online efforts and achieve greater impact.
We base our work in this area on four core processes:
- Defining Audiences and Goals, thinking critically about who you want to be talking to and what you are trying to get done before moving to tool selection.
- Publishing matrix, establishing an organizational communications standard grid that indicates when to use which communications channel for what type of information.
- Communications calendar, developing a calendar tracking communications alongside important dates and other programmatic work to ensure consistency and schedule what you need to do ahead of time.
- Listening and Tracking, tracking your measurable goals and listening to feedback to see what tools and efforts are being effective and who cares about your work.
To enable organizations to operationalize these processes, we facilitate hands-on capacity-building and learning activities that include:
- Message calendar design, helping organizations plan narrative arcs and engagement tactics that sustain engagement and campaign momentum.
- Publishing Matrix assembly, showing organizations how to better coordinate and leverage online channels.
- Social media start-up and practice, focusing on both core skills and best practices for scaling.
- Advanced social media and social media policy, addressing skills, tactics and issues that arise as social media adoption scales.
- Email newsletter design and coding review, helping to balance good design, effective audience engagement, and high deliverability of messages.
- Online fundraising advice, assisting those considering options that include web, mobile, email, and social media to understand what works and what’s hype.
- Basic WordPress site creation and administration, helping groups deploy, populate and customize their own version of this excellent and user-friendly content management system (CMS) for web publishing.
- Social Media Dashboard Assembly, enabling nonprofits to track and understand when and how they are being mentioned online and where their posts and tweets are propagating.
- HTML Basics, showing those interested how to create simple HTML content.
We always welcome requests for other hands-on learning activities and technology skill-building.