How a statewide youth-serving nonprofit explains their 40 programs in three words
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Have you ever struggled to articulate what your nonprofit does in a clear and concise way?
That’s the challenge YSS was facing before they implemented a tagline that helped consolidate their message. More than just a nice sentence, their tagline has become the foundation of their marketing and communication efforts.
Since rolling it out, YSS has structured its annual report, a video series, and presentations around a sentence — really, three words — that encompasses its 40 programs.
On the Nonprofit Storytellers Podcast, we talk to Kayla Choate, director of marketing and communications at YSS, talks about:
Why YSS walked through a months-long process
How they received internal and external buy-in
Why a tagline has benefited their outreach and fundraising efforts
Where the tagline show up in their material and outreach
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Below is an edited and condensed version of the interview. Listen to the entire interview online on the Nonprofit Storytellers Podcast on iTunes, Spotify and Google.
How do you describe YSS and the services you provide?
YSS is one of Iowa's oldest, largest, and most comprehensive youth-serving nonprofit organizations. We were founded in the 70s as Iowa's first youth shelter, and we just expanded from there.
Today we have over 40 programs. We're located in six different cities across the state as well as statewide services. And we have nearly 350 staff.
What is it about YSS's mission that connects with you personally?
When I applied to my role a year and a half ago, I just immediately fell in love with the mission. YSS’s mission is to create hope and opportunity for youth.
I love working with youth and seeing the impact we make every day. We are changing lives, we're saving lives, and I just really resonated with that and wanted to be a part of it.
You walked through a really intensive process to brand your organization. How would you describe it?
When I started, I had friends and family say, “You have a new job at YSS. What does YSS do?”
And I realized I didn't know how to answer that question, and I'm the director of marketing for this organization. Every time I would answer it a little bit differently, and I just really couldn't quite get it right.
I would explain our mission and how we create hope and opportunity, and they would inevitably follow it up with: “Okay, but what do you do?”
It wasn't enough. And I realized my colleagues at YSS all had different answers as well to the question of what YSS does. I quickly realized we needed some sort of core message, tagline, elevator pitch, or whatever you want to call it.
Just a clear, concise, and compelling way to say what we do at YSS. So that really kind of started the whole process of creating a tagline.
You are not alone. I was having coffee with someone today, and he was saying, “I don't know how to describe my organization. We have all of these different programs. We facilitate all of these different things." This is not unique in the nonprofit sector.
I could see the impact we were making internally at YSS. We were so proud, and we know what our programs do, and we know we do it well, but how can we communicate and market that to the outside?
We all want the same thing. We want to educate. We want to inspire. We want to persuade people to get involved and take action. So we really needed a way to explain what we do, educate them, and then inspire them to get involved.
What was the process like when you first realized, one, that this was a problem and, two, that this was something you wanted to solve?
We needed internal buy-in, so we started internally. Ultimately, we employees are the ones that are sharing this core message. We have to believe in it, and we have to consistently give the same answer when people ask what we do.
Otherwise, it's just a fancy tagline that you put on a dusty shelf. So we started internally, and I worked with our VP of philanthropy and community engagement, and we did meetings and focus groups.
We asked people, how would you describe YSS? How would you write the tagline? We took all those answers and whittled them down to a few examples, wordsmithing them. And then we went external.
We emailed our family and friends, our network, people who are in marketing, people who are not in marketing, people who know YSS, and people who don't know YSS and said: “What do you think of this? Does this tell you what we do? Is there a word you're not resonating with?”
Through all that, we really came down to, "I think this is it. I think this is the tagline."
What was the tagline that you came up with?
It was really difficult to come up with a tagline. As I said, we have over 40 programs. The tagline needed to be general yet specific, accurate yet compelling, encompassing all of our programs yet unique to YSS.
We still have to maintain our niche. We can't just do what everyone else is doing. So we came up with three buckets, and that is education, counseling, and stability.
Our tagline is: We empower youth by providing education to build healthy minds and bodies, counseling to overcome life's challenges, and stability to focus on the future.
I love that. When you were getting feedback internally or externally, what types of questions did you ask, and how did you go about getting those questions answered?
We just asked: “How would you tell a family member at Thanksgiving dinner what YSS does? How would you explain your programs? How would you explain this agency?”
Everyone had a different answer because everyone was in a different program. We tried to find the similarities. We tried to find the overlap. And then externally, there were some words that people were confused by. They gave the wrong message.
I sent it to my mom, and she was like, “I don't really know what this means. This doesn't tell me exactly what it is.” We took a lot of feedback, and sometimes we were like, this isn't quite it, but this gives us an idea of the word we're trying to reach toward.
Was there anything that was just out-of-the-box that you ran into or surprising discoveries in that research process?
I knew from the beginning that I wanted a rule of three. The way we humans process information, we like three, we recognize patterns, and three just feels complete in our brains.
Research shows that information presented in groups of three sticks in our heads more than if it is presented in groups of two or four. I know I wanted three buckets. So it was really, how do we fit these 40 programs that are all vastly different into three buckets.
And how did you do that? Did you draw it out on a whiteboard?
We printed out the answers to all the research that we had done, and we just looked at the words, and we asked, “What does this word mean to you?” Because the words we came up with, education, counseling, and stability, those things mean something different to everyone.
We all bring our own biases to the table. So we wanted to ensure that whatever bias that was, it was still accurate, and it was still YSS. What we realized was our mission statement, which is to create hope and opportunity, is wonderful, but it's just too vague, and our programs are too vast.
We needed a solution that was somewhere between hope and opportunity and a full directory or list of 40 programs, which is too much for someone to understand when you're trying to explain it at a career fair or telling a family member about the work that you do.
This tagline was really the bridge between those things. How can we have something specific to answer that question: What do you do?
We wanted something general enough to encompass everything from kids' clubs to mentoring to addiction treatment to mental health therapy.
Where does the tagline show up?
Once we decided what the tagline was, we presented it, and then we had to implement it. Our tagline shows up on our social media in the "About Us" section.
We put it in this year's annual report. We actually structured the annual report around it. So there's a page for education, a page for counseling, a page for stability. I wrote a story that represents each of those areas.
We showed impact metrics for each of those areas. Our designer created a Venn diagram that shows those three buckets, and they overlap with hope and opportunity, which is our mission. So it all connects together.
Then this past fall, we did a video series. We did three youth videos, one for each bucket. So, we did a video on a youth who really represents the education piece, a video on a youth who represents counseling, and how counseling helped her. And then, finally, a stability video with a youth that really needed stability in her life. And she got that through our programs.
Why was it important to share those personal stories?
Storytelling is so important in marketing. It's my personal favorite part of my job. It's just so important.
We can explain it with words, and we can explain it with numbers, but it's not until someone reads or watches, or hears a story of a youth that really exemplifies the work that we do.
That is what tugs at my heartstrings. That's what makes them understand and connect with the work we're doing. And that's what inspires them to take action and want to get involved.
Have you found that when you talk to a community member, they're drawn to one of the particular buckets?
The good thing about our tagline is that it's so versatile. So any of our programs do all three of those things.
Our addiction treatment program educates, counsels, and provides stability for a youth who really needs it and has been struggling.
Our mentoring program educates, provides counseling from a role model, and provides stability for elementary students who need a consistent adult in their life.
The best thing is when we are out in the community at a career fair or at an event or talking with donors, and we present this tagline, they will resonate with one of them.
They'll know a youth who was experiencing homelessness, or they have a kid who's in the mentoring program, or they're really interested in the counseling piece. This offers them three avenues, and they can drive the conversation, and we can go with them until we end up at a program that they are really passionate about and want to support.
One of the things I love about this is when I was a journalist, I would sometimes be assigned to write a story about a nonprofit. And I'd really struggle to write a sentence or two, which is all the room I had to describe the organization.
I know the same is even more true for radio or TV reporters who have even less space. So how have you seen this benefit your organization when it comes to sharing what you do out in the community?
This is now our boilerplate. It's at the bottom of our press releases to help those journalists, “Hey, this is what we do. Here's that sentence that you can use.”
Our community engagement team goes out and uses this. Our CEO uses it in presentations. When we are out in the community, when someone asks what we do, and when we give presentations, I see everyone using these words.
They don't have to memorize the whole sentence. It doesn't have to be copied and pasted, but what is consistent is education, counseling, and stability. And then every employee makes that their own and shows how they are involved in that and how they apply that in their program.
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