We’ve all been there – that moment in the elevator or the casual chat before a meeting starts when someone says those dreaded words: “We have an employee volunteer program?” Despite all your careful planning, strategic thinking, and program development, your Social Impact initiatives somehow remain invisible to many employees. This invisibility can feel particularly painful when you’ve spent months or years carefully crafting emails, posting on the intranet, sharing in Slack channels, creating blog posts, and equipping employee volunteer leaders and managers to amplify Social Impact initiatives.
The disconnect between your efforts and employee awareness can be frustrating, but it also signals an opportunity: the chance to transform your communications approach from scattered touchpoints to strategic engagement that leverages authentic human relationships.
Signs Your Social Impact Communications Need a Strategic Overhaul
Not sure if your communications efforts are limiting employee engagement in your program? Ask yourself, or discuss with your team:
- Are your messages inconsistent across different channels?
- Do your carefully crafted emails generate minimal engagement despite significant effort?
- Can employees – or at least your employee volunteer leaders – articulate your program’s core message?
- Do you find yourself struggling to measure the actual impact of your communications efforts?
These challenges often stem from relying on one-off campaigns rather than developing a sustained, strategic approach. While reactive communications might solve immediate needs, they rarely build the kind of consistent awareness and engagement that successful social impact programs require.
Corporate Social Impact Communications Challenges
If you’re like most corporate Social Impact practitioners, you weren’t hired for your communications expertise, yet you also don’t receive adequate communications support. You might find yourself competing with countless other internal messages, struggling to reach distributed or offline workers, and operating with limited support from communications colleagues. In fact, research shows that 85% of Social Impact teams sit outside of Communications departments, separating them from expertise, tools, and workflows (CECP, Giving in Numbers, 2024).
Poor communications efforts lead to significant risks for corporate Social Impact programs, too. Risks to programs like stagnant participation and engagement and decreased visibility and support; risks to Social Impact programs’ alignment with the business, like weak ROI reporting that undermines leadership support of Social Impact; and risks to community relationships like limited impact and a perception that the company’s Social Impact communications are “just talking” as opposed to action (Morsing, CSR Communication).
This reality often leads to practitioners rating their communications effectiveness much lower than they’d like, despite their best efforts. The good news? You don’t need to become a communications expert to drive real engagement. What you need is a strategic approach that incorporates key communications elements and builds on human psychology and relationship-based sharing.
Building Your Strategic Foundation
The journey from ad-hoc to strategic communications starts with establishing core elements that are critical to any communications effort and baking in the human element. After all, employee volunteering and giving programs are voluntary programs. Communications efforts must connect to your audiences’ human motivations in order to drive engagement.
Communications Element
Human Element for Social Impact Communications
A clear and consistent messaging framework that articulates your program’s value proposition and key themes…
with a core message that’s simple enough to remember but profound enough to guide action.
Well-defined audience segments with documented needs, motivations, and preferred communication channels…
leveraged with an understanding of human psychology – how people think, process information, and behave.
An integrated channel strategy that coordinates messages across platforms and touchpoints…
mobilized by a network of leaders whose connections and peer influence transform a broadcast message into a personal invitation.
A measurement approach that tracks meaningful metrics aligned with your goals…
inclusive of impact stories as they emerge naturally from meaningful experiences.
Think of these elements as the infrastructure that supports all your communications efforts. Just as you wouldn’t build a house without a solid foundation, you can’t build sustainable engagement without these fundamental pieces in place.
The Implementation Roadmap
So, what does addressing these elements look like in practice? It requires some attention and intentional planning and collaboration, but transforming your communications approach doesn’t require an overnight overhaul. Instead, focus on these key steps:
Know Your Audience Segments
Begin by understanding who you’re trying to reach. Do a little research to map the different segments in your employee audience. Beyond basic demographics, dig into what motivates different employee groups, what barriers they face, and how they prefer to receive information. Then, do the same for other audiences – employee volunteer leaders and giving campaign champions, colleagues on the communications team, people managers, and senior leaders. These insights will inform everything from the messages you develop to the channels you use.
Create Clear Value Propostions
Craft or refine a single core message that cuts through the noise and resonates with each audience segment. Remember that humans notice what they’re already interested in – so connect your messages to existing values and priorities (which you discovered above). Then, adjust the framing to suit each audience’s primary motivation. The goal is to make it easy and natural to say “yes” to engaging with your programs.
Channel Strategy
Map out which communications channels will reach each audience most effectively. Ideally, each audience has a primary channel they already use frequently in their day-to-day that you can leverage for Social Impact messages. Consider both formal channels (like email and intranet) and informal ones (like peer-to-peer networks). Remember that communications channels are support systems – they extend human relationships rather than replace them.
Content Frameworks
Develop templates and guidelines that make it easy to plan elements in your communications strategy, as well as maintain consistent messaging that can be adapted for different audiences and channels. This saves time and ensures quality across all communications.
Social REV members can access Realized Worth’s Communication Plan Template and Communications Audit Template to fast-track implementation.
Keys to Sustainable Success
Building a strategic communications approach is the first phase, and maintaining it is the critical ongoing phase. Focus on these elements to ensure your transformed approach delivers lasting results:
Nurture Strong Partnerships
Foster strong partnerships with communications colleagues and other departments by understanding their workflows and priorities. Find out what makes colleagues in communications love working with your team, and what frustrates them (don’t be “that guy!”). Look for opportunities to meet their objectives while advancing yours.
Empower Your Network
Empower and support ambassador networks who can extend your reach. Provide them with strong messaging, plug-and-play resources and templates, a trusted feedback loop, and key metrics to track success. These tools allow you to support your network without being too prescriptive.
Practice Continuous Improvement
Regularly review metrics and optimize your approach based on data. Ask whether the metrics you’re tracking still inform action vs. only report outputs. For example, an email open rate by itself might not tell you how many people took meaningful action after reading the email. The CTA or conversion rate from those emails might be a more telling metric.
Remember to balance quantitative data (e.g., participation rates) with qualitative insights (e.g., stories of impact, feedback on barriers). Reliable feedback loops enable capture of these qualitative insights. Spikes and dips in quantitative metrics represent human stories – find out what motivated those employees to get involved, or to drop off.
Keep up the Momentum
The transformation from ad-hoc to strategic communications is ongoing. As long as you’re strategic, intentional, and in good partnership with communications colleagues, you don’t have to become a master copywriter or graphic designer. Instead, develop and lean into your expertise in making it easy for employees to see themselves in your programs and get involved.
Focus on:
- Understanding how humans think and behave
- Creating clear value for different audiences
- Building systems that support rather than replace human relationships
Start where you are. Choose one element of strategic communications to focus on this quarter. Whether it’s mapping your audience segments or documenting your publication approval processes, each step moves you closer to sustainable engagement that drives real program impact.
Ready to transform your communications approach? Social REV members can access our comprehensive communications guide and toolkit on Backstage, complete with templates, frameworks, and practical examples to help you every step of the way. Want to dive deeper? Contact your REV Agent to learn more about how we can support your journey to strategic communications.