Holistic communications for nonprofits with Meghan Speer
3/4/2025
““We are talking about donors who are humans who have very busy lives, who received 10 other things in their mail that day that needed to be attended to while they needed to be getting their kids dinner and helping with homework and cleaning the house week. Nobody is going to drop everything just because they received a postcard from you in the mail. We tend to then assume, if it hasn’t performed in a week that it’s a failure. [But] we have folks that are responding six months later because that’s when they had the moment to actually pay attention.””
In episode 118 of Nonprofit Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton talks with Meghan Speer about the concept of holistic communication within nonprofit organizations. They discuss:
the importance of ensuring consistency and clarity across all communication channels to enhance donor engagement and confidence.
insights into breaking down silos, fostering collaboration among internal teams, and
how to map out donor touchpoints to deliver a seamless and human-centered experience.
The conversation highlights the need for nonprofits to align their messaging with donor expectations, adopt a long-term view, and prioritize appreciation to build lasting relationships.
Episode highlights:
[00:07:00] Defining Holistic Communication
Meghan explains holistic communication as the alignment of messages across all channels and teams.
She discusses the risks of silos in nonprofits, such as inconsistent messaging that can confuse donors.
[00:08:51] Real-World Impact of Communication Silos
Meghan shares an example of a failed campaign where a lack of coordination between teams led to misallocated donations.
She stresses the importance of having all stakeholders informed and engaged during campaigns.
[00:12:30] Mapping Communication Touchpoints
Carol and Meghan discuss mapping donor interactions to ensure consistency.
Meghan emphasizes identifying key stakeholders and ensuring two-way communication to address gaps.
[00:18:30] Overcoming Campaign Fatigue
Meghan notes that nonprofits often tire of messages before their audience absorbs them.
She advises patience, consistency, and leveraging multiple channels to reinforce key messages.
[00:23:00] Understanding Donor Behavior
Meghan highlights the importance of recognizing donors as humans with busy lives.
She encourages a long-term perspective to allow campaigns to yield results over months, not weeks.
[00:27:30] The Role of Gratitude in Donor Relationships
Meghan shares the idea of hosting thank-a-thons to connect program staff with donors, creating a personal and meaningful interaction.
She underscores the need to close the loop with donors by sharing the impact of their contributions.
Key Takeaways for Nonprofit Leaders
Foster collaboration by breaking down silos and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
Think beyond immediate campaign results and adopt a long-term view of donor engagement.
Invest in consistent, clear, and human-centered messaging across all communication channels.
Show appreciation and follow up with donors to maintain trust and connection.
Engage with everyday donors to gain valuable insights into their motivations and perceptions.
Guest Bio:
Meghan Speer serves as the Executive Director of Nonprofit Hub, a nonprofit educational site dedicated to providing excellent content and resources for those leading nonprofits. She is the host of the Nonprofit Hub radio podcast and has spoken at countless conferences and conventions helping leaders to craft holistic communication and donor strategies. For over 10 years, Meghan was with Marketing Support Network, serving in key executive roles focused on communications strategies that help organizations of all sizes grow and scale. Meghan lives in Pittsburgh, PA where she is active with many organizations serving her inner city neighborhood.
Important Links and Resources:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghan-speer55/
https://www.marketingsupportnetwork.com/
Related Episodes:
E67 Get that Money Honey
E73 Getting your fundraising reps in
E93 Nonprofit fundraising transparency
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Carol Hamilton: Welcome, Megan. Welcome to Mission Impact.
Meghan Speer: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Carol: Yeah, absolutely. So I like to start each episode with a question around what motivates you? What's your why? What, what brought you to the work that you do?
Meghan: That's such a great question. So I think in general, one of the things that I love about the work that I do is that I get to help so many organizations do their why, right? There are certainly things that I'm passionate about. There's organizations that I'm involved with. As a volunteer or on the board.
But the idea that I get to help use the, the skill set that I have to help countless organizations, which then impact even more lives across the world and across the country and in their communities. I love the idea of having that, that depth of impact to lives that I will never know or never get to meet in communities all across the world.
I think that's really cool. So that's my why.
Carol: I love it.
Meghan: I love it.
Carol: ripple effect
Meghan: Yes.
Carol: that we do. Yeah, I totally resonate with that. Like, I'm helping the helpers,
Meghan: Yes.
Carol: so that they can help others and it just keeps,
Meghan: It's so good.
Carol: Yeah. Yeah, so one of your, your area of expertise is really around nonprofit marketing and communications.
And one of the things that you talk about that I think is maybe a little bit different than others is this idea of holistic communications. Could you say a little bit about what you mean by that? And, and yeah, just, let's just start with a definition.
Meghan: Yeah. So I think sometimes the the default mode in a lot of nonprofits is that communication channels tend to get very siloed, right? So the people who are crafting the message and sending out the emails and the people who are crafting the direct mail piece. Are sometimes disc very disconnected from the folks who are answering the phones to take those donations or who are on the front lines doing the programmatic work of the organization.
And so a lot of times what I have found to be true is that organizations have a huge disconnect in how their own internal people talk about the work or about the message that we're talking about at the moment. I do a lot of work in the broadcast space with organizations. You have TV shows and radio programs.
Folks who are calling in because there's a radio a thon going on. You have operators on the phone. Are they using the same language to talk about the campaign these folks are hearing on the radio ads? Are they using the same, the same language that's showing up in the thank you email that they're going to get talking about the impact of what their gift can do?
Right. And so I think so often we tend to have this very myopic view of like, this is the piece of communication that I own without looking at the bigger picture of how that touches all of the points. And so how do we make sure, because ultimately what the goal, right, is to connect a donor to your organization and you want that experience to not be confusing.
So if they get a direct mail piece or they get an email that drives them to a web page, for example, and the web page has nothing to do with the ask that was on that site, it's just your generic donor page. The donor starts to get confused. If they ask a question about this direct mail piece that they got because they called in and had wanted to talk to somebody about it.
And the operator on the phone. Or the, the person on the phone has never seen that particular direct mail piece and has no idea what they're talking about. All of a sudden it starts, we start to lose donor confidence. And so that holistic communication where everything matches from A to Z soup to nuts, all of the people are on the same message just helps to build that connection and, and clarity without providing a confusing experience for a donor.
Carol: Yeah, I've actually heard someone say that a confused mind says no.
Meghan: Correct. Correct. And so.
Carol: it, that kind
Meghan: and we see that a lot.
Carol: the, yeah, in the system really is just. Going against everything you're actually trying to do.
Meghan: Absolutely.
Carol: So how do you help organizations thread that needle and, and, pull some of those silos together or help them identify all the different people who are involved in communications?
They may think, Oh, it's just those two people over there. That one person who has the title communications.
Meghan: Yeah. It's just the marketing department or the donor development department. And so part of that is making sure that everybody has a seat at the table, but in that communication has to flow two ways. We we were working with an organization earlier this year. Who was really very disappointed. They had, had done a huge direct mail campaign and they were very disappointed in some of the, like in the initial result, right?
Like it just did not perform as well as they would have expected it to. And as we helped them trace it back, what we realized is the folks on the phones, the folks who were answering these calls as they were coming in Did not have had never seen the direct mail piece didn't have the campaign ask in front of them And so people would call asking the campaign itself was for a scholarship fund and they these folks had no idea And so they didn't know that it had gone out all of a sudden We realized 90 percent of the gifts that people had called in for had been sent to the general fund and not to this specific ask Because the folks on the phone didn't know that that was even an option At the same time, the web folks had not created a separate page for that.
So folks were going to the, the. General website, leaving a donation. And again, it was going to the general fund. So the folks who are doing this specific campaign really thought that they had failed while the folks in general fund were thinking that they were having a banner year,
Carol: Right.
Meghan: right? So you have two teams that are very confused by the results.
That are happening without realizing that it's because they didn't loop in enough people into the conversation to actually be able to track whether the campaign had performed or not. Great. And so we sat down and figured out one, who's the, who's the point of contact for those frontline phone folks who can come back to your team and say, Hey, we're getting a ton of questions.
This is, this is not clear. We need to. Like
Carol: I
Meghan: to make sure that the web guys know to update the website and have a designation for that specific campaign. And so it takes a little bit of thinking and a little bit of retraining the brain, right?
Because we all want to own our little piece of the pie and this is what we do. It takes a little bit of brain retraining to think about who else needs a seat at the table. Not only to be told that information, but to also receive feedback from, those frontline folks are, are invaluable in terms of the information that they can pass back to an organization with feedback from donors.
And so they have to be able to have a two way communication channel in that it can't just be a, here's the mail hope for the best, they have to be able to give that feedback as well.
Carol: Yeah, and it almost sounds like a little bit of a mapping exercise of like, where are all the touch points? what do we want them? What, when we've sent this direct mail campaign out, what are we hoping that donors will do? What are we asking them to do? And then how will we know? Whether they've done it or not, and then, that larger we and I think people get nervous when you say most seat at the table. So it's like, oh, it's going to be this huge, number of people that and we won't be able to make any decisions. There'll be that paralysis of
Meghan: Yeah,
Carol: large group. How do you help folks kind of, stay, stay focused on, on, what they're trying to achieve.
Meghan: so I saw a statistic, it's been maybe two or three years at this point, but I would assume it's still relatively accurate that there was by one of the like Indeed or Monster or one of the hiring sites had put an article out that said that 89 percent of people who are leaving a job Site lack of information as one of the top reasons that they leave.
And so to your point, I feel like you're right. Everybody's like, Oh, I don't want to too many cooks in the kitchen. We're never going to get anything done, but your team wants to know what's happening. Right. They want to have that information because they want to do a good job. And so transitioning the mindset to, to how do we best equip everyone to do a good job instead of how can we make this campaign be successful?
I think that lack of information is the starting point to that. But realistically, someone has to own the process. So whoever is in charge of that particular campaign, be it the director of development, chief development officer, chief marketing officer, whoever is in charge,
Carol: we're
Meghan: duty has to be
Carol: ahead
Meghan: making sure that everybody in the organization has the information that they need and proactively going to ask for that feedback.
So making sure that someone owns the process to Send out information and get back information needs to be part of the, almost the after action report of a campaign to say, okay, where did we do well, what messages really resonated, where do we need to be more clear, how do we better get information out?
So I encourage all of the organizations that we work with to have the, the pre and post. So before the campaign launches, get everybody at the table. Make sure everyone has the correct information. They know exactly what the talking points are. They know exactly how to answer those questions, where to find the information.
We run the campaign and then we get that same group back together and get feedback. What were the donors saying on the phone?
Carol: have
Meghan: email response that we started to see back from people? Did we have Did we have a conversion rate issue on the website because maybe something wasn't clear or there was something in the process that, that broke down.
How do we make sure that we do better next time? And then you start the process over again. But when we start with the pre and we know that there's a post coming, it holds people accountable to really track that feedback and make sure that those campaigns are being successful.
Carol: And one of the things that I'm hearing and thinking about that mapping is like, there's steps and then there, and if it's not well thought out, and if you haven't thought about all those touch points of the different places, or people that the, the people that you're asking to interact with you there's, there's, there's It's like, there's, there's a, there's a valley without a bridge.
Meghan: Yes.
Carol: how do you build those bridges? Yeah.
Meghan: Yes.
Carol: Yeah.
Meghan: I worked with an organization.
Carol: Go ahead, go
Meghan: Yeah, I worked with an organization a couple of months ago, and as we did an initial survey on these communication things, what we learned very quickly from the folks in donor services, like the front line, taking those calls, talking to donors, handling complaints, those pieces what we learned very quickly is that the number one thing they heard from donors most often was, You are, I am so tired of these emails.
I hit unsubscribe and I'm not, you still keep sending me emails. I'm getting way more than I need, on and on and on. The marketing team, the fundraising team on the other side had never gotten that feedback before. They weren't tracking unsubscribes. They weren't really looking at that as a metric.
And beyond that, the more that emails didn't produce, the more emails they sent thinking like, Oh, it'll just, if I just keep hitting them more and more than that message is going to resonate and it was having the entire opposite effect, but these two groups had never talked to each other. So the, the donor services folks on the phones were getting so frustrated because they were getting complaints all the time and getting yelled at for the volume of emails.
And these folks were thinking, eh, just more email, more email, more email. That's the solution. And so you got them in a room and they started sharing these two opinions and you could just see these light bulbs going off of like, Oh my gosh, we probably should have told them six months ago that this was a problem as, especially as we started to see more pieces creep up and these guys going, Oh man, we really dropped the ball and missed the boat here.
So when you start to include more people in the conversation, you really can find those gaps where the bottom can drop out of a campaign like that.
Carol: was on a call with some folks yesterday and the whole notion, you've talked about being on message, everyone knowing what the message is, being, being consistent, being coherent. And I think when you're the person. And, and you also talked about two way communication. It's not just one way, but when we're in that one way we get tired of the message way sooner than the person on the other side has actually absorbed it.
Meghan: Yes.
Carol: often people in the nonprofit sector are very creative and they want to, do lots of different things. And so that discipline of consistency can be really, really challenging.
Meghan: Yeah, because realistically, think about how long your marketing team has been working on that campaign before it even, the first email even gets sent, right?
Carol: Right.
Meghan: From the design to the
Carol: of it
Meghan: they're tired of it before that first email even goes out. They don't even want to talk about it anymore.
Carol: right?
Meghan: done. They've been working on that for six months and now we got to get to get to the next. Yeah. Whereas the folks on the front lines who are just going to start getting the feedback of that are in a totally different position. And so they have to be equipped, marketing has to remember that there is another side.
Like once they hit, send on a campaign, a new chapter of that campaign starts where they might not have new graphics to create, or they might not have new copy to write, but there is still feedback to be received and, and campaigns to tweak.
Carol: So I think what I'm hearing is, is, is, thinking about it in a much longer time horizon and, and staying with a particular message much longer than people might be used to doing, especially with the idea of, oh, we're going to test it. And then we're going to switch and we're going to pivot to something else. And, how long are they being patient around the testing of it?
Meghan: I think too, there's so There's this idea, especially in a lot of nonprofits right now, where we have a new, a new ask every month, every month has a new focus, and maybe that's because we're giving away a new ebook or a new series or a new whatever, but we're every month we're switching up the ask. And it's almost hard for people to keep track of, right?
I, we at Marketing Support Network, we run a call center and I was doing some work with an agent around a call where somebody had had, and I do this myself, right? You get something in the mail outside of the urgent, like I need to open my bills and pay them. A lot of times they just stack up and all of a sudden, and then three or four, eight weeks later, I go through the pile of mail.
And decide what actually needs to be attended to. And this lady was calling, she had received a direct mail piece asking to participate, like asking to be, for folks to give to a certain campaign, to get a new book that this ministry was putting out. The mail had hit her house in March, and she was calling in October.
The organization has had seven different offers between March and October, right?
Carol: about?
Meghan: she's, they have no idea, and it, it, she was so confused, the agent was so confused as to how anybody could, like, well, that was for March, why would you expect us to have it available? She was like, I'm just going through my mail, I don't know.
Things pile up, and, and so we tend to, And I think that this is an overarching theme. We've talked about it on the nonprofit hub podcast. So many times this year is that we tend to forget that donors are also humans. So you have to think about how you engage with information as well. It would be lovely to think that as soon as an email hits, everyone is going to drop what they're doing and pay attention to that email and do the thing you've asked them to do.
Or as soon as the mail comes, they're going to pick up the phone and call right away because they want to be. I get it. That is the dream. We would all love to think that our organizations are that important, but we are talking about donors who are humans who have very busy lives, who received 10 other things in their mail that day that needed to be attended to while they needed to be getting their kids dinner and helping with homework and cleaning the house week.
It's just. Humanity, nobody is going to drop everything just because they received a postcard from you in the mail. And so we tend to then assume, if it hasn't performed in a week that it's a failure.
Carol: Right.
Meghan: you're, we have folks that are responding six months later because that's when they had the moment to actually pay attention.
And that's the moment they had to deal with it. And so I think sometimes that long term vision gets lost. In the shuffle and I understand that I understand we would all love instant feedback and instant results, but your donors are human and that is just not human behavior. It's not how you engage
Carol: Right.
Meghan: things that you receive so understanding that timetable and understanding that like we do have to give it probably six months longer than anyone is anticipating.
To really see how things have, have played out and what that looks like.
Carol: How do you help organizations take a deep breath and just realize it's going to be a longer, a longer runway?
Meghan: It's so hard, especially when you have, maybe, and for us, a lot of times that starts with going Up the rung a little bit, right? Because if your development staff is, is constantly under pressure of, we've got to make budget, we've got to make budget. If we don't, we're going to close. We're, nonprofit lives in this constant
Carol: Sure.
Meghan: cycle of pressure in that regard.
So stuff like that, when it has to be, Pause. Take a breath. It's going to be okay. Let's think about this in a much longer term way. Those things have to come from the top down. So where we might focus on, or where I might focus with an organization on messaging and making sure everyone's involved, if we're talking about trying to shift culture, that has to come from the top.
And so we do a lot of work with executive leadership to around, okay,
Carol: Okay.
Meghan: to be, they need to be six months down the road. I need you to be a year down the road. And then let's back it up from there and figure out how we're going to get there. And so understanding that, like, This constant pressure cycle that we have driven them to be in and forced them to be in is then creating negative impacts on donors in terms of the pressure that they feel.
And so how do we just take a step back and pause, but that has to be driven by the top. So that's a cycle that you've got to break further up the chain.
Carol: Yeah, and I can imagine, thinking about those staff people as humans, right? I mean, they want to do they're under that pressure. They know what their goals are. And so they're going to lean into things that they have control over, like, I'm going to send more emails or I'm going to do, yet another offer because that's within their severe of control, not thinking about how the impact it's having on their on the folks that they're trying to draw in,
Meghan: Yes, and I think that's ultimately the end of the, at the end of the day, right? Everyone in this process is an actual human,
Carol: right?
Meghan: right? And I, like, from the folks who are sending the emails and writing the copy and answering the phones to the people who are giving, to the people who are receiving the services or, or, the impact that your organization provides, every single person in the process is a human.
And they're going to behave like one, right? Expecting them not to is setting yourself up to fail,
Carol: Well, that is true.
Meghan: right? Expecting them to
Carol: Mm hmm.
Meghan: way
Carol: Mm
Meghan: setting yourself up for failure. And so part of part of understanding holistic communication is understanding human behavior, right?
And understanding. Your message does have to go out probably seven more times than you think it should for it to finally resonate. But that doesn't all have to just be seven more emails. How are we also how are we talking about these things on social media? How are we talking about these things in our direct mail?
What are we doing to engage in human behavior? Like I just worked with an organization the other day where we set up so the week between Christmas and new years, all of their frontline program staff, they're going to be hosting a thank a thon. Where they are just calling through donors, but these are folks who are on the front lines who don't often get to, to hear from donors didn't understand, why their work matters, but also the donors don't often get to hear from them, their, their frontline perspective of like, thank you so much for giving because of that, I was able, me personally, I was able to help X and Y and Z And they're, they make a big party of it.
They have pizza and they bring it all in. It's all catered and it's just a fun party for them. The week between gearing up to that New Year's Eve giving it goes such a long way just to be thanked for these donors, to hear from you as a person and to be treated like a person instead of just bombarded with more asks.
So what ways are you treating them like humans in the back and forth to in that communication style? How do we make sure that they feel appreciated and not just overrun? how do we make sure that and part of that holistic communication in the end of a campaign has to be what's the follow up mechanism mechanism for.
Appreciation is there a video that goes out specifically to the donors for that campaign showing the impact their gifts had is there a specific series of updates that go out to just those donors to make sure how do we make sure that we're closing the loop, not only with our own staff internally, but also with our donors so that they know what their gift did.
Carol: Yeah, that part of closing the loop can be so hard because
Meghan: Yes,
Carol: that same dynamic of I, I've moved on to the next thing, and I've, I've forgotten that I even sent that thing, whatever, 6 months ago yeah, yeah,
Meghan: you think about, if you think about you in any sort of relationship in your own personal life with your spouse, with your kids, with your friends, if you had another person who only ever asked you for things and never bothered, like never bothered to say thank you for that, first of all, it is only ever coming to ask you for things.
You're going to shut that relationship off real quick.
Carol: Yep.
Meghan: Or you're going to have a really good conversation with your kids about, Hey, this is not how humans behave. This is not how we build relationships, right? Like this would be a teachable moment for a child. And yet somehow we think, again, we ignore the fact that these donors are humans.
And we just keep asking, asking, asking without ever following back up to show them what their last gift did
Carol: Right.
Meghan: and really closing that communication cycle and proving to them that we do appreciate and value them. So when we talk about holistic communication, that has to be a part of the, the campaign as well.
It's not just an add on. It's not a you know,
Carol: Nice to do.
Meghan: Nice to do. No, it is a, a actual part of this campaign that has to be planned out as well, because if we don't make it a priority, that's where we lose folks.
Carol: Absolutely. Well, you talked about culture through this and on each episode at the end, I asked again, the guest what permission slip or invitation would you give to nonprofit leaders to avoid being a martyr to the cause and as they work towards cultivating that more inclusive, everyone at the table organizational culture.
Meghan: Oh, that's such a great question.
Carol: would you offer nonprofit leaders? Hmm. Hmm.
Meghan: I would, I'm going to do it as an invitation. I invite you. I'm going to be very. I invite you to get to know your donors and I'm not just talking about your major donors, right? Everybody has a plan for the top level. They have high contact. We're doing a lot of touch points there. Get to know those 20 a month, 50 one time gift folks.
I've worked with a number of organizations and some of the most valuable pieces of information they have ever received are when the executive director or the CEO makes five phone calls a week to five random donors and just says, thank you so much for giving. Can you tell me why you did? Right? You will learn so much as a leader about your organization from the public perception of it and from what really resonates with people that will impact your messaging for next year.
It will impact the way that you write your campaigns and how your staff goes about that. I invite you to get to know Average Joe donor and make that a priority for 2025 because it will change the way that you think about your donors and it will change the way that you handle your marketing and messaging.
Carol: Well, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on mission impact. It's been a great conversation.
Meghan: Yeah. My pleasure. Thanks so much.
Carol: All right.
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