Here at GMT we're seeing a trend among our current members and groups we're talking to about potential membership.  Everyone is facing financial difficulties, that's no surprise.  But what we're hearing is that the first cuts to be made are to the communications program -- whether it's a team of people or one person or a handful of services used by the organization.  And once those cuts are made, the communications responsibilities are being distributed between program staff who, more often than not, don't have any experience or training in communications or specifically media outreach.

Around the same time we were noticing this pattern, I read an extremely insightful report from Charity Village Campus called Training in tough times -- tips for cultivating your nonprofit's capacity.  Although the focus of the report was really for managers, the main message is that when financial times are tight, organizations cut staff and give additional workload to remaining staff members without reducing their current set of responsibilities.  It makes sense to try to get the most out of your team, but if you give a task or responsibility to one of your staff members without the appropriate training, that person is being set up to fail.  They'll feel the demands of their job are too much and will eventually decide to seek other employment.

Lack of insight about this common management pitfall can lead to the loss of really talented staff members. So there is a lesson for managers to make sure you give your team the resources they need to succeed, especially if you're tightening budget strings and asking your current staff to do more than ever. 

But that aside, the GMT team talked quite a bit internally about what we can do to help our users who are in the position of now having to do media outreach for their program or even entire organization. Our members have access to the same tools regardless of their skill level.  They can find reporters, look at past coverage, and build targeted lists based on a number of search parameters.  What we think we should provide is some communications "lifeboat" training to help groups get the skills they need to do successful communications now and in the future. 

We're still discussing how this could work and what specific topics are the top priorities.  We'd ideally pull together a team of communications professionals to deliver a series of targeted online trainings to help prepare these groups to continue to do the outreach they need to do. Many groups probably need the nuts and bolts of audience definition, message planning, communications planning, writing news releases, building relationships with reporters, getting interviewed by a reporter, tracking coverage, and developing an online presence so information is readily available for interested reporters.

It would be helpful to get feedback about other training areas we should consider and effective trainers who can get the job done. Share a resource you find invaluable in doing your communications work.  And tell me if we're going down the right path with this idea. 

As a side note, we also figure that if this is happening to our members, it's happening to all nonprofits.  If this training series is effective with our members, we can hopefully replicate the program to help other groups as well. 

We'll do our best to document our progress here on the GMT blog and look forward to ideas & feedback.

Bobbi