Are Your Nonprofit’s Communications Quietly Undermining Your Values? A Practical Guide for Executive Directors

Values-based nonprofit communications build trust and clarity. Learn the six signs your nonprofit’s messaging conflicts with its mission.

Are “Good Enough” Communications Actually Good Enough?

Let’s say you lead a small- or medium-sized charity. With a deadline coming up fast, you review a piece you’re about to issue and think, “OK, that’s good enough.” But then you recall something you read about communications aligning with values, and you wonder, “Is this piece really good enough?”

If this thought gives you pause, then consider your communications output as a whole. Ask yourself:

• Is our messaging aligned with our core values?
• Are the values we talk about aligned with the communities we serve?

If you answer no to either of these questions, this post is for you.

The Hidden Costs of Misalignment

A charity’s most important asset is trust. But a misalignment in values erodes trust with donors, clients, partners, and staff.

Misalignment also skews your decisions. If you can’t say who you are and what you stand for, it’s harder to say yes or no to a proposal.

Finally, misalignment creates emotional friction. It jars staff who care about values but feel put off by the language used in fundraising appeals.

If your messaging truly reflects your values and those of your audiences, no one feels that emotional friction.

Six Signs of Misalignment Between Communications and Values

If you’re concerned about the language-values alignment of your communications, you can quickly home in on the difficulties. The signs are easy to spot.

Clarity

1. Everyone Has a Slightly Different Version of Your Story

A lack of clarity means everyone has a slightly different version of your story. Your language may vary across grant proposals, website copy, social media, and staff talk. As a result, new staff, board members, and partners struggle to understand what you’re really about.

2. Your Values Don’t Show Up in Your Messaging

It can also mean that your stated values don’t show up in your actual messaging. If a section of your About page talks about equity, collaboration, and transparency, but other communications don’t embody these values, they aren’t consistently expressed across the full suite of your communications.

In assessing clarity, it’s important to consider not only what you say, but what you don’t say. If your values are truly reflected in your operations, make sure they also show up in your communications. If you value your partners, name them.

Stakeholder Values Misalignment

3. Donor Appeals and Community Realities Are Out of Sync

Are all stakeholders aligned with your values?

For example, do donor appeals reflect the realities of your community? Or do fundraising communications embody nonprofit saviour complex while program staff and community partners value client dignity and agency?

Ask your staff to read an appeal out loud. Review feedback from your community or funders. If there are any “cringe” moments, they’ll show up fast.

4. Audiences Hear Different Versions of Your Values

Do all your audiences hear the same version of your values?

Does donor messaging talk about stewardship and impact while staff hear about burnout and “doing more with less.” Do program participants hear about empowerment, but then encounter a cumbersome intake process and bureaucratic language in your intake forms?

Internal Disconnect and Friction

5. Staff Feel Uneasy

Is your team onboard with your messaging? The best way to find out is to ask them.

Ask your team if they are reluctant to share posts, if they feel conflicted about certain stories, or if they quietly rewrite your messaging for their own use.

Listen to the feedback you receive. If it’s detailed and constructive, great. You can use it to improve your messaging.

If your team’s feedback is vague but signals unease, you have more work to do. If you hear remarks like “This doesn’t feel right,” gently press for more detail. Ask your team to articulate what “doesn’t feel right” actually means to them.

6. There’s No Shared Language for Your Programs and Your Impact

You might find that your organization has inadvertently become a Tower of Babel.

Ask your team to share their elevator pitches for your organization and key programs. Do they express the same concepts? Or do they vary widely?

Review the way your team talks about key projects and partnerships, especially new ones. Is there unity in the messaging? Or do your announcements seem improvised?

Reviewing the Six Signs of Misalignment

If your communications show at least two of the six signs of misalignment, they may be quietly undermining your stated values. The misalignment may not be dramatic, but over time, it can erode trust and tarnish your brand.

What does communications-values misalignment look like in practice?

How Misalignment Shows Up

If your communications and values are misaligned, it will show up in a unique way with each audience your organization serves.

Donors and Funders

Well-aligned funding communications prioritize donations while upholding values like dignity, equity, and shared power.

How do your funding campaigns frame your clients? Do your campaigns focus solely on need, or do they also emphasize your clients’ dignity, resilience, and agency?

How does your team talk about your programs and clients in written proposals and funder meetings? If your communications and values are aligned in this area, your team’s pitch will reflect your values with fidelity.

Getting alignment right with donors and funders is vital for any charity. Your organization’s financial health and impact depend on it.

Program Participants

Another type of misalignment can arise when you talk about your program participants in ways that don’t reflect how they see themselves.

If your communications are off in this area, your participants won’t tell you directly, but the effects can be disastrous. Clients who feel othered, pitied, or used for their PR value will not succeed in your programs or act as good ambassadors in their communities.

Misalignment in this area can also create drag in program execution. Invitations to co-create can fall flat if program participants don’t see themselves in the public face of your organization.

Staff and Volunteers

Finally, your internal culture must reflect the values you profess publicly. Misalignment in this area can show up as cynicism in break room conversations. It can also take the form of quiet resistance, when staff hesitate before approving content or avoid promoting it.

Leaders are stewards of both mission and culture. Values-aligned communications make these two things consonant. Your marketing team can’t bring them into alignment by itself. That task requires leadership.

Values-Based Communications Audit

If you have the uneasy feeling that your values and communications don’t line up, the best way to find out and lay the groundwork for future action is to conduct values-based communications audit (also known as a nonprofit communications audit).

But what exactly is this audit? Let’s take a closer look at what it is — and what it isn’t.

What It Is

Put simply, a values-based communications audit is a structured look at how your current communications reflect or contradict your stated values and those of your stakeholders.

It focuses on alignment, clarity, and consistency, rather than attempting to rebuild your communications from the ground up.

Most importantly, a values-based communications audit produces actionable results, which you can use to bring your comms back into alignment where they have drifted.

What It Isn’t

A values-based communications audit is not a judgement of your values. It doesn’t say whether they are good or bad. It simply checks for the consistent expression of those values.

It’s not a finger-pointing exercise. There’s no room for fault-finding in this review.

Nor is it a huge, open-ended engagement requiring dozens of meetings, extensive staff hours, and a giant report that no one ever reads.

Finally, this audit does not aim to lard up your communications with trendy jargon — with one exception. If your communications diverge significantly from the language of key stakeholders such as donors and program participants, the audit will highlight this divergence and gently prompt you to consider alternatives. 

The purpose here is not trendiness for its own sake, but to point out cases where the euphemism treadmill has moved on from language that was previously acceptable. If we want to influence people, after all, we have to speak their language.

Audit Process

A values-based communications audit typically unfolds along these lines:

1. We review key communications, such as your website, campaigns, impact stories, newsletters, and social media through a values lens.
2. We compare the values you profess to the values that actually show up (or don’t) in your communications.
3. Where applicable, the audit can also include interviews with select staff and other stakeholders to gauge how your communications land with them.
4. We identify patterns: unclear language, diluted (or contradictory) values, and misalignment between internal and external messaging.
5. We show you how to fix specific instances of misalignment.

Deliverables

The deliverables for this audit are concise and actionable. You’ll receive the following:

• A one‑page, colour‑coded scorecard assessing your mission clarity, language and values, impact stories, and calls to action
• A summary and point score of the results
• Three quick wins you can implement immediately
• Practical next steps for medium‑term improvements
• A concise report detailing longer-term strategic work

Align Your Communications with Your Values

Communications and values can easily drift apart over time. That may be a cause for action, but it’s not an occasion for a guilt trip. It’s a natural, and correctable occurrence in the life cycle of an organization.

Most organizations have many hands contributing to the communications function. Many hands naturally contribute some variations to the work.

Values also change gradually over time. This is true for you and your donors, staff, and audiences alike.

Misalignment occurs in every organization at times. If you suspect it is occurring at yours, take these two preliminary steps:

1. Ask three people in your organization to describe your mission and values. Do all of them use similar language to describe your mission and values?
2. Pick one frequently used piece of messaging and ask your team, “Does this piece truly reflect who we are and what we do?”

Image credit: Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash