Crafting Your Unique Voice and Style for Your Cause
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Your organization’s voice is the unique tone and style you use to communicate your mission and engage with your audience. It’s more than just words; it’s the personality of your cause that resonates with your supporters and distinguishes you from other organizations. Developing this voice involves focusing on key attributes that reflect your values and goals. Here’s how you can find and craft your own voice and style for your cause.
Understanding Your Voice
Your voice should be a reflection of your cause’s core attributes. Consider how you want to be perceived by your audience. Are you persevering, inspiring, compassionate, or smart? These characteristics set the tone for how you talk about your organization and shape the personality of your communications.
A clear, persuasive, and reliable voice is essential. Your communications should be personal and sincere, ensuring that your message resonates on a deeper level with your audience.
Creating Compelling Messaging
To distinguish your organization and appeal to a broad audience, your messaging needs to be compelling and consistent. This means describing and showcasing your activities in a way that defines your organization for those who are unfamiliar with your work. Aim to provide simple, consistent answers to the question, “What is your organization about?”
Your messaging should create a personal connection with your audience and emphasize the difference you make and how you make it happen. Highlight the impact of your work and the methods you use to achieve your goals.
Tips for Using Your Voice
Inspire with Stories
Inspire your audience by sharing stories that show your members and participants as people of action making a difference in your community. These stories should highlight real-life examples of your impact and the dedication of your supporters.
Provide Clear and Compelling Facts
Include clear, compelling facts and data that demonstrate how your organization contributes to solving problems. This evidence helps build credibility and shows that your efforts lead to measurable outcomes.
Share Personal and Professional Growth
Describe moments when you or fellow members recognized the power of your cause. Share stories about how members benefited or grew personally or professionally from their involvement with your organization. These narratives can illustrate the broader impact of your work beyond immediate outcomes.
Use Testimonials
Testimonials from community members or partners can articulate the benefits your organization has brought to those you served or reached. Personal endorsements provide powerful validation of your efforts and can be very persuasive.
Highlight Notable Achievements
Showcase notable programs, projects, press coverage, recognition, or partnerships that reinforce your organization’s credibility. Highlighting these achievements can demonstrate the success and recognition of your work, building trust with your audience.
Consistency is Key
Using your unique voice consistently in all of your messaging ensures that your communications sound and read unmistakably like your organization. This consistency helps build a strong, recognizable brand identity and lets the world know what you do to create positive change.
Conclusion
Crafting a unique voice and style for your cause is essential to connect with your audience and effectively communicate your mission. By focusing on the core attributes that define your organization and using them consistently in your messaging, you can inspire support, build credibility, and create lasting change. Your voice is the heart of your organization’s communications—make it clear, compelling, and true to who you are.
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Frequently Asked Questions
A shopper starts shopping online by first going to iGive.com.
The shopper, your supporter, identifies your cause as the one they support. If your cause is not already on our list of causes either they or you can add it. This tells us where to send the donation. This only has to be done once unless the shopper wants to stop or change causes.
The shopper then identifies the merchant where they want to shop that day from our categorized list of over 1700 merchants. Once they click on that merchant, they are finished for the day with iGive and taken directly to the merchant’s website. If they have shopped there before, they begin shopping. If it is their first time shopping at this merchant’s website, they will have to follow the merchant’s instructions for registering there by providing their name, delivery address, payment method, email address, and perhaps some other information depending on the merchant.
When they are finished shopping, they check out as usual. They are done and only have to wait for their order to be sent to them.
Meanwhile, back at iGive, a message is received from the merchant which documents the transaction. Periodically the merchant adds up what they owe iGive in the way of commission and sends iGive the money. This sometimes takes a month or more after the shopping trip because the merchants want to take into account returns, exchanges or other modifications to the total amount they collect.
iGive then adds up all of the commissions that they have received that are designated to be shared with your cause and sends you the accumulated portion for your cause. This is usually added up on a monthly basis for the period since the last donation to your cause.
There is no cost to the shopper or to your cause.
iGive works with all types of causes — big or small, local or national, and regardless of whether they are a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit or not.
Merchants pay iGive a commission from the shopper’s purchase because iGive referred the customer to them. They want customers to shop at their store, and shoppers with iGive want to shop at stores that support their cause. iGive utilizes that commission to facilitate a donation to your cause on behalf of the shopper.
The money sent to your cause is the incentive iGive offers shoppers to use iGive.com as the entry to online shopping at our 1700+ affiliated stores.
This is different from when a cashier asks if the shopper wants to round up or add a dollar to donate when the shopper checks out — in that case, the shopper is paying slightly more to donate to the store’s chosen cause—not the shopper’s. With iGive, the shopper pays the same amount they would if they didn’t use iGive. Your cause receives a donation from iGive for all of your supporters who use iGive.
The amount the cause receives depends on how many of your supporters use iGive and the amount of money they spend shopping online. You can increase the amount of the donation by encouraging your supporters to use iGive.com when shopping online. Your cause does not pay iGive anything.
iGive has a wide range of participating stores. These are listed at iGive.com either by category of merchandise or a comprehensive list of all merchant affiliates. This includes popular online retailers in categories such as clothing, electronics, travel, and more. See the list of affiliated stores here.