Leaders: Promote Your Vision One Drop at a Time

Any good marketer knows the value of a well-run drip campaign.

The idea is to establish a cadence of doling out bite-sized nuggets of information, with each message or touch point steadily raising awareness, building engagement, and ultimately moving people to action.

Drip campaigns typically aim to sell a product or service. Yet social good leaders can also deploy the tactic to avoid leaning too heavily on a single communication vehicle — an annual report, a strategic plan launch — when what they need is focused, sustained messaging. 

To be clear, a leader who embraces drip campaign-style communications wants to be selective. You can start losing an audience by relying too heavily on the approach. Drip campaigns walk the fine line between enlightening and annoying. 

A general guideline is that drip campaigns work best when the goal requires building understanding, trust, behavior change, and consistent action. They can backfire when messages are delivered with no clear goal, a weak narrative arc, and appear to be driven more by a desire to be visible than to achieve specific objectives.

Here are three potential scenarios when adopting the drip-campaign mentality can be effective:

Unveiling a bold new strategic vision: A five-year plan dropped all at once tends to overwhelm, running the risk of people skimming the executive summary and moving on. Developing a plan to “drip” insights focused on one pillar at a time lets each idea land with greater clarity. It also builds understanding and anticipation for the next pillar, turning a potentially static document into a story that unfolds with increasing clarity and purpose. This helps those in your audience better understand the value of the strategic vision for your organization and the role they can each play in embracing and advancing the mission.

Conveying impact to key stakeholders: You can’t assume donors, funders, community members, and even your internal team have a good grasp of your organization’s impact. So instead of relying primarily on an annual report to highlight impact, a drip-campaign approach positions you to share incremental wins. Communicating a key milestone achieved, an eye-opening data point, or an inspiring story of transformation all reinforce that investments of money, time, and commitment to the cause are paying off. Follow the annual report with smaller drips of content to keep the momentum going, and encourage people to view or revisit the report to gain a broader understanding of what your organization is achieving. 

Rebuilding trust after a crisis: After the initial chaos of managing a crisis, it’s tempting to move on as though the trouble never happened in the first place. But trust is rebuilt over time, not just by carefully crafted announcements. There’s nothing wrong post-crisis with shifting much of your focus to areas where your organization is succeeding. It’s also wise to signal that you haven’t forgotten the crisis by peppering in a steady cadence of small show-don’t-tell proofpoints to regain credibility.

There’s a reason marketers lean on effective drip campaigns. They know communicating isn’t about delivering the perfect message once. It’s about making the right points often enough that they resonate. 

If you’re a leader looking for new ways to build engagement and momentum, collaborating with your communications or marketing leader on a drip-style campaign offers an opportunity to make that happen.

Odds are you’ll start to see a steady flow of greater understanding, engagement, action, and impact.