How to effectively work with Comms Ninjas
by Aditi Seshadri - Feb, 6, 2024
Aditi Seshadri, Co-founder & Partner at Unlock Impact shares some helpful tips to enable strong collaboration and effective communications that will help growing organisations get the most out of their investment.
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
Over the years, we’ve worked with all kinds of organisations — from solo entrepreneurs to grassroots NGOs, family-owned and run social businesses to impact investment funds, and even corporate foundations and funded hyper-growth startups — and while they are often wildly different in what they do and how they function, we have managed to have successful engagements with all types of teams and ventures. This is not a boast about how amazing our Comms Ninjas are (which, incidentally, they are :P) but rather it made us think about what makes some collaborations more successful than others and some comms strategies more effective than others.
As an enterprise that primarily works in social impact and almost exclusively with growing organisations to amplify their impact storytelling and be part of their growth trajectory, we’ve long learned that the business of Comms and high impact communication is instinctive and fun, yes, but also needs to be thoughtful, planned out and consistent.
Here, we’ve outlined what we think it takes to have a fruitful and long-standing engagement with our Comms Ninjas — or any comms specialists for that matter — so that your organisation or brand can get the most out of your investment while your ninjas can get the motivation and direction they need.
Time commitment
The biggest challenge for every growing team is time — how to make more time, how to utilise the time better, how to make time work for everyone. And often, the biggest misconception is that once you’ve hired your Comms Ninja, you won’t need to spend time on comms anymore. Yes, the whole point of hiring an agency or a specialist is that you don’t have to do all the work exclusively anymore but this engagement is most effective when both you and your Comms Ninja work collaboratively on developing and executing a strategy and plan that is in-depth, thoughtful and long-term.
This takes time — hours, days, and weeks of discussion, brainstorming and planning — but it is time that is better spent: instead of trying to make sense of LinkedIn’s new algorithm, you could be helping set strategic goals that will streamline strategies in development communication. How wonderful that sounds!
2. Choose the important over the urgent
We often get hired when the organisation is going through a crisis or things have reached an inflection point where it’s do or die (or at least the teams feel like it is) — ‘We have only two months to put out our annual report’ or ‘We need marketing collaterals for this event ASAP’. And while we pride ourselves on our Comms Ninja’s ability to hit the ground running and adapt to situations quickly, this also leads to shortsighted prioritising of the ‘urgent’ over the ‘important’.
Yes, it’s important to get those brochures designed urgently for next week’s conference but it is also critical to plan for your broader strategy in alignment with your organisation’s goals, in a manner that can be executed consistently. Communication for development is a long game, it takes time and thought to change.
Comms Ninja tip:
With every new client, irrespective of their short-term goals, we work with the team to create a long-term strategy that does an analysis of their current comms and then uses that to develop a strategy and execution plan for 12–18 months
3. Checkin and review regularly
Good comms is all about consistency. That’s right, it’s not about creativity or ‘virality’, it’s really about getting clear, precise content out regularly. One of our most effective engagements has been with a network of education organisations located in Asia and Africa — it has been stable, now entering its fourth year, and has resulted in the growth of the organisation’s digital communications as well as its impact.
One big reason for this is regular communication through a streamlined system of weekly or biweekly catchup calls between the team and the Comms Ninjas (this sometimes spills over to Slack chats), and regular ongoing review of the work and tweaking plans and strategies based on this analysis. This is especially important in a distributed remote working culture like ours with clients located all over the world. In this case, the organisation is headquartered out of London with a team sprinkled all over India and parts of Africa, while our Comms Ninjas are in multiple cities in India, but they all make it work.
Comms Ninja tip:
Catch up weekly with your Comms Ninja, even if it’s just for 10 minutes, it’s important to know what the week’s tasks are and get them assigned and checked off. More importantly, set aside time for analysis and review to know what works and what needs to be improved; do a top-level review every quarter or six months and an in-depth one annually
4. Invest thoughtfully
Like life begets life, comms begets more comms. Once the ball is rolling, you will find that there are more and better things to do and, guess what, you will want to do all of it! That’s what happens when you’re having fun with your brand and your storytelling. However, reality bites, or in the case of impact organisations, things like budget cuts, donor mandates, limited people resources, merging of departments all come into play so any investment needs to be practical and adaptable and, ultimately, aligned to the larger goal.
For example, if you are looking to put out regular social media content, marketing collaterals, or impact reports and cards, then it makes sense to invest in either a Canva Pro account for design templates or even a designer to create a strong visual design that pops. However, if the focus is more on blogging about key issues and trends and driving credibility, then reorient your resources toward that and ditch the design expense for now. It’s tempting to be everything, everywhere, all at once but you’ll get more bang for your buck if you streamline and focus.
5. Inclusion and access
It’s natural to think of an agency or a freelancer working with your organisation as an ‘external’ resource compared with team members who are on your employment rolls and work every day with you and next to you. However, work culture as we used to know it, is changing. And organisations are finding it easier and more cost-effective to hire part-time, freelance, or remote resources -particularly in specialisations such as Comms — as it helps them focus their time, training, and resources on their own mission.
However, it’s important to think of these ‘external’ resources — our Comms Ninjas — as part of the organisation’s fabric and as key players who are helping you grow the organisation and take it forward, much like anyone else. We have had clients who have been so wonderfully inclusive with our Comms Ninjas — making them part of team calls, strategy meetings, celebrating special moments together — which has not only helped build connections but has resulted in a deeper understanding of the brand and its goals on the ninja’s part, ultimately resulting in better outcomes for the Comms.
Comms Ninja tip:
When you bring us on board, don’t think of it as ‘outsourcing’, instead let’s think of it as ‘in-hancing’ your team
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
We’re just a month into 2024 and there’s no better time to put together your brand’s building blocks and truly create impactful communications that will help your organisation soar.
