Do you like to hang out with them?

No, you like to hang out with people who know how to have a real conversation, to move back and forth between your concerns and theirs and to find common ground.

As with people, so with organizations. If you talk about yourself all the time, you drive people away. If you talk about your audience’s needs and wants, their hopes and fears, their desires and expectations, you entice them to join you in a common cause.

If you want to attract people – sell product, recruit volunteers, solicit donations, build brand loyalty – you must connect with your audiences. You do that by talking about them and their concerns.

Consider a web homepage that opens like this:

Welcome to the ABC website! Association to Benefit Chickadees was founded in 1939 with the mission of protecting chickadees from predators (especially humans) and raising awareness of chickadees’ unique contributions to our ecology, literature, and song. Since then, the ABC has opened out to include all members of the genus Paridae, including tits and titmice. Many of the most ardent supporters expand their interest to include all songbirds.

OK, maybe you’re chuckling over my fanciful organization. (I tried to pick a cause that wouldn’t step on anyone’s toes. If you’re an ardent supporter of chickadees, please forgive me.)

But substitute a real organization and its constituents for the ABC and chickadees, and you’ve got the homepage of thousands, maybe millions, of nonprofits.

The question is, who cares? If you were a looking to support chickadees (for “chickadees,” substitute entities you would actually want to support) and this page came up in your search, would you know whether you had found what you were looking for?

No. You would know some of the history of this organization but nothing about what it actually does today and, more importantly, whether its goals are the ones you are looking to support.

Let’s try it like this instead:

If you love chickadees and other wild songbirds, we’re with you! The Association to Benefit Chickadees will help you support our small feathered friends. You can join our public awareness efforts, make a donation, or contribute to our photo and song-recording archive. However you participate, you will be making a difference for chickadees throughout the world.

Or maybe a more urgent call to action is needed:

Every day, thousands of chickadees die in the jaws of opportunistic predators, and thousands more are forced into unsuitable habitats by building projects and McMansions. Stop the slaughter now. Join the Association to Benefit Chickadees.

The secret is to focus on the needs and desires of your audiences, showing them how your organization can help them do what they want done.