A 10-minute messaging self-audit
Your work is critical. The results are there. And the people who need to say yes still can't see it. This self-audit shows you where your message is losing them.
How this works. Answer the 10 questions below honestly, using your actual materials: your homepage, your most recent grant application, your last donor email. Not the version in your head. The version on the page.
1.Can a stranger read your homepage and say what you do in one sentence, without using the words "empower," "community," or "impact"?
2.Does that sentence name who you serve and what changes for them because of you?
3.Does your mission statement fit in one breath when spoken out loud?
4.Does your grant language name what the funder cares about, or what you care about? (Yes = the funder's priorities appear in the first paragraph.)
5.Could a program officer skim your application and find the answer to "why does this fit our mandate" in under a minute?
6.When you describe multiple programs, is it clear how they connect, or does the organization look scattered on paper?
7.Do your materials say what you do differently for each audience (funders, partners, members, government), or does everyone get the same paragraph?
8.Are your strongest numbers visible in the first thing each audience reads, or buried on an impact page nobody visits?
9.Do you name concrete results (dollars saved, people served, outcomes changed) instead of describing activities (workshops held, meetings convened)?
10.Would someone reading your materials know what happens next if they want to act: give, partner, join, refer?
Answer all 10 questions to see your score.
Your score
A four-page report explaining what each of the ten questions was actually measuring, why that specific thing decides whether a funder keeps reading, and what to fix first based on where you scored. Free, and it arrives in your inbox in a couple of minutes.
Get the full breakdownWould rather just talk? Book a 20-minute conversation.