The next thing to figure out is the nub of the communication… what exactly do you want your reader to do after reading, watching or listening to your content?
This can sound a bit businesslike, especially if you’re driving for donations or legacies, but it can be as fuzzy as raising awareness, inspiring interest, or being so entertaining people subscribe the newsletter for more.
In the private sector, this is pretty straightforward - most communications need to end up either selling something, or generating leads that can be sold to.
Broadly speaking there are 3 kinds of objectives for any charity communication:
Captivate
To interest or inspire the reader, fire them up about your cause, give them good feelings about your organization (like trust), and prime them to tell friends or colleagues.
If you’re communications directly reach your beneficiaries, captivating them with relevant communications is usually the first step to signing them up to a service.
If you’re trying to affect political change, captivating decision makers or their influencers is a valuable skill.
Contribute
To encourage the reader to make some contribution, an obvious one would be a donation, or volunteering application.
Less obvious ones are signing petitions, tweeting about your cause or firing off an e-mail to their local MP.
If they can’t make any contribution at the point of reading your content, then pledging to take action later is a handy trick… might as well grab their e-mail address in the process as well.
Capture
The other kind of action is a capture. That is asking people to subscribe to your newsletter, twitter feed, join your facebook group or whatever. This allows you to communicate with them frequently, and build a relationship which can lead to the actions above.
Usually this involves just being interesting, or interacting in social media conversations. You can sometimes influence people by dropping the hint to “Join the cause, sign up to our newsletter” or “Follow this issue on Twitter” or similar, but often it’s not needed, so long as your reader can see the newsletter box or twitter box on your page.
Naturally, the best communications can work towards all three, but usually you want to set yourself an easy goal and pick a main objective.
Remember that ultimately, the goal of every web site should be to find a win-win solution.
Next: Writing for eNewsletters