Finding Your Organization’s VoicePhilanthropy Daily

For myriad reasons, the hardest leadership transition is from founder to his first successor. After all, the organization’s vision is the founder’s vision; the organization’s culture is the founder’s culture; the organization’s voice is the founder’s voice. Your stakeholders have no frame of reference for your organization that does not center its founder. The departure of a founder—even if it’s planned and amicable—can trigger an identity, if not existential, crisis.

Well-functioning organizations, of course, prepare for this eventuality. The board shapes the organizational vision and formulates succession plans. Redundancies are developed to reduce institutional dependency on the founder. The cohort of stakeholders grows and matures. But who stewards an organization’s voice? Moreover, if the founder himself has a distinctive and recognizable voice, do you have an independent organizational voice at all?

Finding Your Young Organization’s Voice

Developing your organization’s voice will smooth your first leadership transition, lay the groundwork for the next stage of organizational growth, and reassure stakeholders of your organizational trajectory. Here’s how you find it.

Recommendation #1: Survey the broadest possible swath of stakeholders about what they think your organization’s voice is. This survey should include the usual suspects—board members, supporters, program recipients—but it should also incorporate constituents who are on the periphery of your work and thus are less familiar with your standard “elevator pitch.” Learning what these constituents think your organization is and does will illuminate how you are perceived externally. Prepare a document that compiles your findings and highlights areas of commonality among those surveyed. Then, compare these findings to your existing mission and vision statements and share the document with your stakeholders. (An ancillary benefit of this process is that, as with a campaign feasibility study, it will deepen the engagement and buy-in of these stakeholders at a potentially perilous moment for your organization.)

Recommendation #2: Retrieve and compile as many documents as possible—board meeting minutes, emails, memos, fundraising letters, etc.—from your organizational history to understand the thought and development process behind the mission and vision statements, as well as how staff have talked about the organization across various media over the years. Focus especially on communications from when and even before the organization was actually founded. In so doing, you will uncover your organization’s voice at its rawest. Then, trace how these communications evolved as the organization took shape and grew. What stayed the same? What changed? Why did it change? Compile these findings into a document that highlights your answers to these questions and other key takeaways.

Recommendation #3: Compare this document to the stakeholder survey you prepared. The communications document illuminates what your organization was trying to convey in its external communications. The survey illuminates what your stakeholders actually think your organizational voice is. Comparing the two will uncover the extent to which you have succeeded in finding your organizational voice.

Recommendation #4: Equipped with all of the above, collaborate with staff (and perhaps select other stakeholders) to draft a new core messaging document. This document should include tailored messaging about every aspect of your organization and for all of your main communications channels. Once complete, it will become the hub for all of your organization’s messaging and the urtext of your organizational voice.

Recommendation #5: Invite team members who will be communicating externally on behalf of your organization to develop their own distinctive voices within the parameters of your organizational voice. This is the crucial final step in the development of an effective organizational voice. Team members will naturally talk about your organization in different ways based on their distinct roles, perspectives, and personalities. Having participated in the entire process outlined above, they are well-equipped to find their own distinctive voices within the organizational voice.

Finding—or Refining—Your Mature Organization’s Voice

What about finding a mature organization’s voice? The process is quite similar, though the challenges differ. The advantage is that you have far more resources at your disposal for the stakeholder survey and analysis of historical communications—more potential stakeholders to consult, more communications to analyze, and more human and financial capacity to execute the process thoroughly. The challenge lies in finding a unified organizational voice when so many people have been speaking on behalf of your organization for so long. This places more importance on the fourth step: developing a messaging document to serve as a guide for all of your organizational communications. And it demands more vigilant oversight of the fifth step: ensuring that your entire team is speaking the same organizational language even as team members sometimes use different words.

Executing this process will steer you through the Scylla and Charybdis of developing an organizational voice. The Scylla is cleaving to your approved messaging so tightly that anything other than a copy-and-paste of your messaging document is discouraged. The Charybdis is not anchoring your team to a messaging document at all, leading to many different and potentially dissonant voices instead of a coherent organizational one.

Your organizational voice is not a solo, but it also can’t be a cacophony of discordant voices. By executing the process outlined above you will transform your organizational voice into a beautiful, harmonious chorus.