The train I take into Manhattan goes through some fairly dreary (and fairly stereotypical) New Jersey landscape. There’s some light industry, a little heavier industry, a lot of highway and parking lots, and a fair bit of swamp.
Technically, this swamp is “wetland,” and it’s a vital environmental resource. But to my mind, shallow, brackish water in an industrial wasteland, surrounded by densely populated cities and towns whose waste products inevitably end up in the pools and marshes, is swamp. Its color is coming back, but most of the time it’s a sort of gray-green.
No wonder commuters keep their faces buried in their newspapers or iPhones. There’s really not much to see.
But one day a few weeks ago, I happened to look up from my to-do list to see a burst of hot pink out my window. There were flowers blooming in the middle of this desolation, mad pink flowers that must have been four inches across on stems nearly three feet tall, a great wide field of them nodding to the sunlight.
I gaped as two fields of these miracles went by. To be fair, this took about three seconds. It didn’t occur to me that the phone in my hand cleverly doubles as a camera.
But I was still thinking about those flowers the next time I made the trip. And I’m still thinking about them now, trying to recover the image of a burst of color in all that desolation.
You know where I’m going with this, right?
Too many nonprofit communications are the verbal equivalents of North Jersey swamp. Dull. Colorless. Suffused with sameness.
If you lead with your committee-designed mission statement, if you make your first paragraph about you (or your funders) rather than about your audiences and their needs, people have no reason to look up from their papers and iPhones.
Your chance to engage your audiences goes by at 80 miles an hour. With every technological advancement and every new information outlet, the train picks up speed. No one pays attention to gray-green same-as-everyone industrial swamp communications.
You’ve got to be pink.
You’ve got to stand out. You’ve got to say up front, in the boldest language you can muster, what you do. You’ve got to make people care about your organization and what good it does in the world.
Gray-green homepage:
Welcome to the new website of [division whose name you don’t understand of the organization you never heard of]. Through a grant from [funder name], in partnership with [partner name 1], [partner name 2], and [partner name 3], [organization acronym] has established this website as a portal to enable teachers, principals, administrators, out-of-school education providers, funders, policymakers, and participants and their families to understand the vital importance of engaging girls and young women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, education choices, and careers.
Hot pink revision:
We show girls how to love science.
Women are still under-represented in careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The gender gap has barely budged despite 30 years of educational initiatives.
Our unique model of STEM education makes science real and relevant to girls. We want to share this model with educators everywhere.
You see the difference, right? It’s not only that the hot-pink version is shorter, though that helps. The main thing is that the second version starts off with what’s most important: girls and science learning.
The best follow-up for this homepage text would be a story about a girl who learned to love science or a scenario of a loving-science-learning session. Add some great (non-stock) photos of smiling people. Now you’ve got a homepage that has at least a fighting chance against the newspapers and iPhones. You’ve made people look.