Message matters: succeeding at the crossroads of mission and market.

There is one matter on which every presidential candidate agrees. Hillary Clinton to John McCain, Mitt Ronmey to Barack Obama--they all believe that it is their message that is critical to their success. Whether winning votes or dollars, the right message that moves the audience to the desired action is key to capturing the White House.

That's why every presidential contender spends much of every day focused on what they say to whom, whether they're in California or Georgia or Illinois. And whoever becomes president will continue to concentrate on the message nearly every single day.

While leaders in most business sectors follow the lead of our country's chief executives and take responsibility for strategic message development, most presidents of nonprofit organizations rarely, if ever, take the lead.

Unfortunately, such lack of leadership can be fatal when messaging is relegated to the communications or development department with no executive director responsibility. In a world where it grows harder to be heard every day, nonprofits risk disappearing if they fail to adopt messaging as a "mission critical" function.

Strategic message development, today, is what strategic planning was during the 1980s and 1990s: An essential best practice for organizations that want to remain competitive and achieve mission success. Where strategic planning focuses on internal organizational alignment, strategic messaging focuses externally, connecting the organization's goals to what actually drives its audiences to take the action required for mission achievement.

That desired action could be almost anything: vote the organization's way, fund it, volunteer for it, participate in its programs, buy its products and services, quote it, or collaborate with it in some other important action.

Creating strategic messages requires hard, strategic decisions and challenges the culture of many nonprofits--additional reasons why responsibility for creating them resides in the executive office. There is a simple yet powerful way to create messages, although its simplicity belies the difficulty of its execution.

Five principles underlie development of successful messages. Several run contrary to the traditional non-profit mindset, yet applying the principles is essential to creating messages that motivate action. These are the five principles:

1 ACTION DRIVES MESSAGE

Every nonprofit requires action on the part of others to achieve its mission. What is the action you want your audience to take?

As author Steven Covey advises, begin with the end in mind. Obvious as this principle is, it is often ignored. Members of the message development team often wrongly assume that they all agree on the action sought by the organization. Or, the work of identifying what action the organization actually seeks--which is a major strategic decision--is very difficult to accomplish.

2 SELF-INTEREST DRIVES ACTION

This second concept is as self-evident as the first: people act because they want something.

Target audiences will respond to your messages based on their interests, not those of your organization. Failure to accept this axiom leads nonprofits to tell people what to do or think--rarely a recipe for success. And turning a blind eye to the importance of self-interest as a motivator will fatally flaw message development.

To many professionals working in nonprofits, this principle smacks of selfishness. Self-interest, however, is not inherently a character flaw. It is simply natural.

As demonstrated by all of the many nonprofit professionals and volunteers who live out their own self-interest in their work, people commit their work lives or donate their time as a reflection of their passions. When they work for the National Audubon Society instead of Habitat for Humanity, they are simply reflecting a greater passion for conservation than housing the homeless. Both are noble causes.

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3 DESIRE TRUMPS NEED

Management consultant and author Peter Brinkerhoff says it best: People have needs. People seek wants.

While most nonprofits, associations, and foundations are focused on what people need, most people are focused on what they want. Even when human conditions appear to be situations of obvious need, action may be driven equally, or more, by desire.

The Illinois Department of Transportation proved the power of desire in 2000 when it replaced the didactic "Give 'Em a Brake" signs at highway construction sites with ones that read "My Daddy/Mommy works Here--Slow Down Please." In the first year, the state saw a 30-percent reduction in work zone fatalities.

The need-focus of most nonprofits tends to drive messages that tell target audiences what they need to do rather than focusing on why they want to do it. The need-focus creates a major impediment to successful message development.

4 OVERLAPPING DESIRE SUSTAINS ACTION

Mutual satisfaction is the key to successful messaging and to the sustained action required to achieve an organization's mission.

Once your organization knows what action it wants to prompt--in other words, knows its desire--and it identifies what desires motivate its audiences to take that action, you can see whether there is overlap between the two. If there is an action connection, a strategic message can be written; if there is no overlap, it cannot.

Identifying the overlap is the first step. Whether the organization is willing to meet its audiences' desires is another matter.

Does your organization have the capacity to meet these desires? Is it willing to develop the resources or find funding to expand the resources to meet them?Are meeting the desires a high enough priority to reallocate time, staff, money or other resources? These are strategic decisions and, thus, require executive leadership.

5 LESS IS MORE

Nonprofits tend to think that if one fact is good, 100 facts are better. Not in a strategic message.

Many memorable phrases make no more than three points. Think of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Or remember stop, drop and roll.

People can't quickly grasp more than two or three points. A complex message with lots of facts will be tuned out. A strategic message successfully engages audiences by limiting itself to no more than three major points. After the audience is engaged, large amounts of information can be delivered.

KEEP FOCUSED ON THE END GAME

Surviving the first fateful minute of contact with your audience is critical. The purpose of a strategic message is to capture the attention of your constituents, engage with the audience around their desires, and structure the subsequent conversation between them and the organization. Having been engaged around its desires, the audience will cede the organization time to deliver the critical call to action that you desire. NPT

Rebecca K. Leet is author of "Message Matters: Succeeding at the Crossroads of Mission and Market," published by The Fieldstone Alliance. She is president of Rebecca Leet & Associates, in Arlington, Va. Her email is RLeet@LeetAssociates.com