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The Smart Communications Podcast
Episode 204: Is the field of nonprofit communications coming of age?
00:23:10
Is nonprofit communications finally growing up? Unpack 16 years of hard truths and hopeful signs from the latest nonprofit communications trends report.
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This is the Smart Communications.
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Smart Communications Smart Communications Podcast.
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Developing the voices Voices. Developing the voices of determined nonprofits brought to you by Big Duck.
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Welcome to the Smart Communications Podcast. This is Farah Trim Peter, co director and worker owner at Big Duck. Today we're going to ask the question, is nonprofit communications coming of age? We're going to talk about the profession upon reflection of the Nonprofit Communications Trends Report. And I am delighted to be joined by the person who may have been on the podcast the most as a guest. I'm going to have to double check this later, but Kivi Larue Miller has been on the podcast many times before, not just talking about the nonprofit Communications trends reports, but also talking about communications teams and messaging and other topics. So if you don't know Kivi, you're going to get to know her in the next bit of time. But you probably do know Kivi, and we're excited to have her back. So Kivi Larue Miller uses she her pronouns. She is the founder and chief strategy officer of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide where she is also the lead trainer and coach for hundreds of nonprofit communicators. She is the award winning author of three books on nonprofit marketing and communications used by many universities and certificate programs. Kivi, welcome back. Times 10. I don't know how many it's been.
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Thank you, Farrah. You know, I'm really a very competitive person. So now that you've told me I might be wearing the crown, I want to keep the crown. We'll have to come up with more things to talk about.
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B
Yeah, keep the crown. I will. I will do some fact checks later, figure out literally how many times you've been on the podcast. But we're definitely in the 5 to 10 zone, I think, making you our most, our most frequent guest star.
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C
Oh, for sure, for sure.
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Well, excited again to have you back. And today we're going to focus on the 16th annual Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, which combined insights from a survey that you do every year. This past year, the survey was responded to by 322 people who spend at least 50% of their time on communications or marketing work at nonprofits. 80% of those participants are from the U.S. 11% Canada, and the rest from other nations around the world. So we are so excited when this report comes out every year. And back in 2010, when you first published this report, I mean, that feels like a lifetime ago. So we're recording this conversation in January 2026, the day after you released the report. And it's been interesting. I've been seeing lots of memes on social media, people flashing back to 2016, which was after actually had some good things for me. That year was the year I finally got married to my wife. But even going back further, 2010, I was just only. I was a baby at Big Duck. I was only here for three years. I had been working in the sector for longer. But 2010 has taken us back and I want to go a little bit back to that time and hear some bigger picture reflections. So 2010 to 2026, what are some of the biggest differences from that time period to now in what you're seeing with nonprofit communications trends? And, and really are we in adolescence? Are we 16 years old as a field? Or do you think maybe we're ready for adulthood? What's coming up for you in that reflection?
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I tried to remember if I met Farrah as a baby duckling or not.
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I think you might have met me pre2010, I wanna say at the end 10 conference in probably at some point, I don't know, I'll have to go back on LinkedIn and see when it says we first connected.
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That's very exciting. Have to look at that too. But yeah, I think, you know, obviously nonprofit communicators have been around for more than 16 years. Right? I mean the nonprofit sector I think over a hundred years old at point in the U.S. but you know, things are very, very different now and very, very different in the last 16 years. So you know, we love a good metaphor at nonprofit marketing guide. So in this year's report we're using things like curfews and homework. You know, as a 16 year old, you're ready to take on the world, but you're still kind of surrounded by these systems and parents, executive directors in the metaphor who, you know, tend to hold you back a little bit. And a lot of that we found this year, you know, we really tried to explore a little bit deeper why some of these things are holding back nonprofit communicators. And it really does come down a lot to the leadership that they're working for. Not really giving them the right amount of time and space and support to do what they are fully capable of doing. So we, we are sort of like that anxious 16 year old ready to take on the world, but you know, still being held back a bit.
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I never want to go back to being a teenager, but you know, we got to go through it. You got to go through this adolescent period to emerge.
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It's true.
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So when I read a preview of the report and again, excited now that it's fully out. I was struck that some of the biggest findings tied to structural issues in terms of how nonprofit communications is treated as a function. And that's certainly something that I know our team at Big Duck, your team at Nonprofit Marketing Guide, has talked about. We've co written ebooks on nonprofit communications teams and the idea of the function. But let's talk about that piece. We'll get into it. Folks always have questions about tactics and where they're spending their time. But let's start here. What stood out to you about what's happening in the sort of structure and how nonprofit communications teams are seen within organizations? And why do these problems continue over the past 16 years and beyond?
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C
Yeah, I feel like it's a little bit of Groundhog Day each time I write this report because we are seeing those same kind of problems come up over and over. In particular, people feel like they're just way too reactive, don't have time for strategy, just really feeling like they're always running around and not being able to spend time on the things that are really important to making a true difference for their organizations. So this year we decided to really probe that a little bit more and a little bit deeper to try to figure out what is truly going on. And it's really not that the communications staff don't know what they should be doing or don't know how to do it. It's really not a best practices issue or an education issue anymore. It is truly about the environment that nonprofit communicators are being asked to work within. And of course, that can be very complicated. It includes relationships. Does their executive director really understand what strategy looks like in marketing and communications? Do their project folks who are asking for their support understand what strategy really looks like in our work? Do they have the tools? So it does come back to some tactical things in some places, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. But ultimately I don't think it's about the staff and them not knowing the right thing to do anymore. It's really about the world they're functioning in. And so it does go back to things like that. Coming of age, you're ready, but the world maybe isn't ready for you.
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Yeah, we talk a lot in our workshops and some of the communications planning work we do with our clients around the difference between strategies and tactics and the importance of all that laddering back to a goal or a set of goals and also prioritization. And I know your team and our team both believe in the power of saying no to things. We've talked about that before too. So it sounds like it's less about needing to always just build the skills of the communications team, but really deepening people's understanding of the function of communications. I'll give a shout out to Sarah Durham, the founder of Big Doc, who wrote a book a few years ago called the Nonprofit Communications Engine, which was really written to try to help executive directors, board members, leaders understand the function of communication. So if people are listening to this, you might want to give that book a read. But let's come back to the report. You mentioned a number of realities that you're seeing, and one of those realities that really stood out to me was this one. And I'll quote, communications is expected to deliver long term impact, but is managed for short term wins. Can you break that down for our listeners and share what's happening, why that is, and perhaps maybe an idea for how we can change that?
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Yeah, so let's start by thinking about what we mean by long term impact. So in our sector, it's often about changing the way that people feel and think about issues about the people that our organizations are serving. They're big, hard changes, otherwise there wouldn't be a nonprofit working on them. Right. So, you know, these are things that are not going to be changed by a single social media post or a single email. They are long term relationships that we're trying to build with the people that are following us, that are following us, our cause to change the way their hearts and minds work on our issues. But what's happening is that nonprofits aren't giving their communication staff the time to really make those changes happen strategically. And they're being measured on short term results. And so if you're measuring on short term results, makes it really hard for you to focus on long term results. So one example of that is the nonprofit email list. Now, I can't remember how many years ago it was Farah, but you know, we did a whole podcast on the email Armageddon that I was predicting was going to come. Right, because people were so bad about not managing the health of their email lists. Well, guess what I mean. Still the same problem. And it's not that people don't understand that they should be managing their email lists for health and engagement rather than size, but executive directors, others want to know the size of the email list. So even if half of their list hasn't opened an email in three years, they are still emailing those people. And we all know that is Horrific. That is a one way ticket to the spam folder. And so we shouldn't be doing that. But people aren't asked about the health of the email list, they're asked about the size of the email list. Same thing goes for social media. We all know folks should be doing videos or carousels. That takes time, especially video, to edit to get the right clip online. It's much easier to just do throw up one photo and some text and be done. So we're really asking people to focus on the wrong things that don't really get us to the right long term results. So ultimately this is about measurement, which is really hard when you're trying to measure like how people feel and how people think. But we have to go there. We have to stop just looking at fundraising results or RSVPs and really start to focus on what led up to the RSVP or led up to the donation. It's really about pairing better metrics with those ones that are easier to measure about.
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Some more metrics in a bit, sticking with the idea of the function of communications, I even want to just talk about the profession. You know, in 2025, we saw major increases in layoffs in the nonprofit sector due to federal budget cuts and economic uncertainty. And some sectors or fields within nonprofits saw a big drop in donations. And I'm just curious, how is that showing up for nonprofit communications teams? Based on what you saw in the trends report, is growth stalled, declining, or expected to shift into a more positive direction heading into 2026 and 2027?
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C
I think we're definitely stalled. And you know, there are always little things that create blips in hiring. So the pandemic actually created some blips in hiring. The first Trump administration created some blips in hiring. But generally speaking, I think communications teams are definite, definitely stalled. Only 17% of teams saw growth in 2025. Only 18% expect growth in 2026. The growth is most likely to take place with teams that have already grown. So if you are a single nonprofit communicator, that is the biggest barrier is to get to that second hire. It becomes a lot easier to get that third, fourth, even fifth person after you get past the one person team. We do see very few differences, honestly, between the way the Canadians respond versus the Americans. Everyone always wants to know if there's a big difference. There's generally not. There's always a few little things. For example, Canadians do a lot more events than we do, do a lot more event marketing than we do in the States. But I did find one stat this year that I thought was a little curious. So of those teams that lost staff last year and do not expect those positions to be backfilled. So these are essentially permanent cuts for the next year. 10% of US communications teams lost staff and do not plan to backfill. Only 3% lost staff and did not plan to backfill in Canada. So I think that's a significant number. Again, we don't see huge differences between the US And Canada. And I think that is primarily because of the uncertainty in our economy because of our current political environment. And those losses really are coming from the bigger teams. So it's, we consider a big team, four or more people on a comms team.
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So if you want job security, you should move to Canada. Is that the, the headline here?
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Or maybe work on a small team, you know, there you go. Two or three people.
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There you go. Well, let's, let's go. Let's take the elevator down to the ground level here and get tactical for a moment. Of course, for the past few years you've asked and we've talked about what's happening with AI. We've done a number of podcasts about AI of course, too. And this year I appreciate how you asked whether AI is impacting website traffic. So a very particular slice of the AI conversation. Can you share more about what you uncovered there? Yeah.
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So, you know, if you think about how people use Google today, you have that AI summary at the top, and that is called no click content. Right. So people don't have to click through to your website anymore. Zero click content is another word for it. And so the question becomes, well, is that affecting nonprofits? And what we found is that 16% said yes, we're seeing a decrease in our web traffic, 23% said no. But 61% said they did not know. And I'm really reading this as they did not know if their web traffic was declining because of the way we worded the question. It's not so much whether they're attributing that to the AI summaries or not. And so I think that is really problematic in a potential danger zone for the sector long term. If AI is training itself off of your web content and your social media, but you're not paying attention to what's going on with your website, which pages are really getting the most traffic, then how are you going to be in the conversation about hearts and minds? We're already starting to see AI produce some results that take and take a side results that take an opinion that maybe the nonprofit sector or parts of the sector disagree with. So we're not just trying to change hearts and minds, but we're trying to change the way that AI perceives the debate and the information it's sharing with people who are doing basic searches on that content. We've got to start paying attention to this, folks.
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And I'll just make a note if you're out there and this is an issue for you, we had a great conversation a few months ago back on episode 187 with George Weiner from Whole Whale called How can you shape your AI brand footprint? So we'll link to that@bigduck.com insights for the transcript of this conversation, but certainly recommend folks tune into that too. Well, at Big Duck, we also love talking about the value of project management, and we have staff dedicated to providing project and account management for our clients. I know you, Kivi, share our passion for how important it is that organizations assign people and use systems to keep track of various details and communications channels, and I'd love to talk about that for a moment. What did you find this year related to project management?
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Yes, and you know we love to geek out with you on these little questions, Farrah. This is one of my primary reasons that I love talking to you is because we get to talk about all this nerdy stuff. So, yes, we found that most nonprofits are using what I call their house system, right? So it's either Google or Microsoft. You don't need to use a big, fancy, dedicated project management tool until you're ready for it. It's really okay to use the tools that your organization already has. And most people are. What we really looked at this year is how people are using those tools to manage the different parts of the communications workflow. And great news, people are doing editorial and content planning. Awesome, right? That's one example where we really have seen a great deal of maturity over the last 15, 16 years as people are doing editorial planning now. But we're seeing that they're not really using those same tools to manage the places where the process breaks down. So interruptions in the process, where are those happening? Where are things slowing down? Bottlenecking two places, all that stuff people are constantly asking for all the things that are getting dropped in your lap and meetings, on emails and casual conversations, all of that new stuff that ends up being what you react to instead of sticking to your plan, where all that strategy is built in, that's not really being managed with project management tools. And that's a real missed opportunity for those of you that are just continuing to take all of the random suggestions and requests. The second place is really in the content review process. So how long are people getting to review things? How are you dealing with conflicting comments? A lot of that is just still randomly happening in a Google Doc or a Word file, and it's not really being managed in the same way that the planning is being managed, for example. And so this is a place where I think people can be more strategic in how they use tools to manage that whole content creation process.
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Great. Well, I know we've been talking about a lot of things, some really clear, some perhaps a bit upsetting to hear or frustrating. Let's go optimistic for a moment. We are both geeks. We are also people who generally are sunny side up. So are there any areas of progress that you found in this year's report or that you're seeing in the work that you're doing with organizations that you'd like to highlight?
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Yeah, I alluded to it earlier. You know, I think we do see a real maturity in the sector. People know how to plan, they know how to weigh their options. So that's wonderful to see. And I do think in some ways the pandemic actually helped a lot of people level up because that was a crisis that we all had to manage together. And I think the organizations that really learned a lot from that whole process are actually applying those same lessons now to our very chaotic political environment in the US Here, people are asking strategic questions. We continue to find, especially through our coaching programs, that the communication staff are the ones asking the hardest questions internally to the organization. They are the ones asking the real strategic questions about what a nonprofit's priorities should be programmatically, because that then feeds into what they should be doing on the comms and marketing side. So I think that's great. We have a lot of strategic thinkers out there. It's just about getting the systems to. To support that. Tactically. I think people are finally more savvy and kind of over social media. I think we all had a lot of promises made to us over the last 15, 20 years that did not come to fruition. So we are seeing that people are much more savvy about their social media choices. And I see that because people are not running to TikTok, they're not running to threads, they're not even running to Blue sky, although I think last year we held that up as an, as an or option to get away from X. We don't see a Big rush of folks really getting excited about new platforms anymore. Like they just want to make Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn work for them and try to be as savvy as possible there. So we're seeing a lot less of that kind of shiny squirrel syndrome that we may have seen 10 years ago. And I think that's another sign of maturity in this sector. That's a really positive one.
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Yeah. I'll be curious in particular if that one, how that evolves in the next few years.
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Yes, me too.
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It is time to wrap things up. I really do encourage folks to go download and dive into the report yourself. You can access that@nonprofit marketingguide.com trends. You can also access resources, get training and coaching and more@nonprofit marketingguide.com and also join their free community. If you'd like to connect with the Nonprofit Marketing Guide and Kivi, you can find them on Instagram and LinkedIn. Kivi, thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Before we go, anything else you'd like to share?
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C
Yeah. Stay in the sector, please. I beg the people who come to our webinars and our coaching programs to stick it out. It's really hard right now, but your energy and your creativity are immense, immense benefits to humanity. People like the reason you're working for a non profit is to change the world for the better and you really are doing that. So please stick it out. Stay with us. You have a lot of communities of support. You've got great content coming from the big ducks of the world. You've got our Community at Nonprofit Marketing Guide where you can hang out with other communications directors online who get it and who are there for you. Please stay. Please stay in the sector with us.
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Yes, we appreciate you. Well, we also appreciate you, Kivi, and everyone out there listening. So thank you and have a good day.
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Are you a fan of this podcast or Big Duck's other resources on non profit communications? If you are, we'd love to hear from you. Please drop us a line by writing to helloigduck.com to tell us what you're working on and what topics you need help with. We also welcome getting your feedback via reviews. You can review this podcast wherever you listen. We'd love to hear from you.
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This is the Smart Communications Podcast, Developing the Voices of Determined Nonprofits brought to you by Big Duck.
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Big Duck is an agency that puts smart communications in the hands of nonprofits. We help our nonprofit clients develop strong brands, strong campaigns, and strong teams that advance their missions and achieve their goals.
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Connect with us@bigduck.com.