Getting everyone else in your organization to cooperate with meeting internal communications deadlines is a perennial nightmare for nonprofit comms staff.
So this year, we decided to specifically ask whose job it is to enforce those deadlines in our Nonprofit Communications Trends Report survey. After all, if you aren’t meeting internal content creation and review deadlines, you won’t be meeting the deadlines to get the content out to your community in a timely way — unless of course, the comms staff works overtime to make it happen. And that NEVER happens, right? (Insert dripping sarcasm.)
Here is the preliminary data so far.
Who is responsible for enforcing internal deadlines for program staff to get information, decisions, or draft content to the communications team?
Communications staff: 41%
No one has clear responsibility when internal deadlines are missed: 28%
The executive director or other senior-level executives: 18%
Program staff supervisors: 9%
Other: 4%
The way we read this, just 27% of the people responsible for the performance of program staff are actually taking on the responsibility of ensuring that program staff meet their communications obligations and deadlines. Yikes.
We’ll share the full data and more when we release the Trends Report in mid-January.
The survey for the 2022 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report will be open through Dec 29. Please take the survey now to be a part of this timely research!
