3 Tools For Creating the Ideal Team
May 25, 2022
Marketing/Communication is hard enough. Finding the right people to tackle those objectives and goals that fall on that MarCom Team? Sometimes it feels almost impossible.
Fortunately there are resources available to evaluate the skills of prospective team members - not in terms of right or wrong, but within the realm of strengths and capabilities - so you can more readily assess the suitability of those you may or may not hire to join your team, and access the best results in terms of Marketing and Communication efforts.
How to Get Started Building Your Nonprofit MarCom Team:
The first task is to understand that marketing is not just a simple line item, nor an easy write-off. Marketing MUST be an integral part of the process from the get-go.
Treating marketing as optional leads to a number of problems. These include: lack of awareness of your cause, underwhelming donations, and a general lack of support, whether financial or in the form of volunteers.
The list goes on from here, but it is critical to understand that marketing must be a part of every board meeting - whether or not you find yourself required to ask for the funding to pay for marketing and communication efforts. We talk more about this very topic in this blog post here.
Finding the right members of such a team can be tricky at best, and frustrating at worst. Those who may seem ideal on paper (and even during the interview process) might not ultimately fit in, and those who don’t impress at first glance, may ultimately prove to be the best fit.
So how do you analyze the strengths of prospective members of your MarCom team?
There are a number of ways - two of which we ourselves use at Cindy May Marketing.
How To Evaluate Your Nonprofit Marketing Team:
Now referred to as the CliftonStrengths Assessment, this is the first of our own potential hire tests. Out of 34 different and unique strengths, Clifton offers the chance to nail down the Top 5, with additional insights on the other 29. It provides a “role-based report with manager-specific strengths” to help you understand who you’re dealing with and in what categories their personal strengths lay.
The basic package is affordable, and more than sufficient for determining the basics of personality- and professionally-based skills and tendencies. With a tool like this, you can open the door into who this person is, at a core level, and what their strong suits are.
The next assessment we send to our potential hires is the Kolbe A Index. According to them, the Kolbe A Index “does not measure intelligence, personality or social style. It measures the instinctive ways you take action when you strive. Use your custom Kolbe A Index Results to be more productive, less stressed, and unlock joy.”
This, we have found, is a top-notch way to understand preparation patterns, motivation metrics, and action-based advice. It is how you can figure out the specific skill sets and specializations each potential candidate boasts.
This is the second of our own personal choices in regards to evaluating candidates, and it has proven extremely useful in balancing the strengths of one team member against another as we have built our team, brick by brick.
DiSC is another personal assessment tool, used to “help improve teamwork, communication, and productivity in the workplace.”
Use it to: raise self-awareness, increase teamwork, make conflict more productive, develop sales skills, ensure more effective management, and train without judgment.
With one million people every year learning the insights and skills listed above, there is no doubt that such a service would give you the proper understanding of your possible marketing hires, so you can build the strongest nonprofit marketing team possible.
There are many such services that exist in the digital space. Our hope was simply to provide you with three, to get you started.
Because there’s no question: building the best team is hard. Really hard. But with the right tools - and the right resources to draw upon - hopefully that journey will be just a little easier.
How To Learn More About Nonprofit Marketing:
Follow our blog, subscribe to Cindy May Marketing emails, and even feel free to schedule a complimentary 30-minute call with Cindy May herself - the success of your nonprofit efforts and the mastery of your nonprofit marketing is what we do best.
We’d be honored and delighted to help. And, as always, we have more information headed your way soon, so we can help you learn, grow, and make the impact that only you can.
Thanks for reading, fellow world-changer. To be continued.