How to Hire the Right Fractional Communications Director

As your non-profit grows, the story you’re telling your community is everything. The quality and consistency of that story demands you have someone – or a few someones – dedicated to telling it. But there’s also the reality of tight resources, so a full-time hire may not realistically be in the cards.

Therefore, hiring a Fractional Communications Director may be your best bet.

For starters, let’s take a look at what the role entails.

What Does a Fractional Communications Director Do?

The Fractional Communications Director in a non-profit setting is the lead strategist in charge of all things related to your organization’s digital presence, including, but not limited to:

Website content

Social media content

Email marketing and outreach strategy

SMS marketing and lead management

They also are tasked with developing your digital communication strategy, including leading and collaborating with your digital content creation team through conceptualization, creation, and execution of digital campaigns, including tasks like:

Messaging development

Stats analysis (especially against your organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Best practices development and standard operating procedures (SOPs)

And last but hardly least, acting as the final editor for all content you distribute across internal and external content channels.

As you can see, the job requires someone to wear multiple hats.

The Balancing Act Required of a Fractional Communications Director

At any point, a Communications Director may have involvement in any/all of the following six functional areas:

1

Online marketing and advertising

2

Data analysis and reporting

3

Digital fundraising

4

Online community development

5

Digital trends and innovation

6

Collaboration and coordination

Fractional digital directors often develop and execute digital marketing campaigns for your organization’s initiatives, events, and fundraising efforts.

This execution may involve resource allocation to online advertising platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads to reach your target audiences at a reasonable cost.

They also collect and analyze data related to all marketing efforts, including website traffic, social media engagement, email marketing, and other channels, to measure the effectiveness of the total strategic initiative.

As part of this analysis, their goal is to identify areas for improvement where the organization should double down to leverage what’s already working and provide regular reports and insights to stakeholders, so they stay in the loop of how your organization uses the allocated marketing budget.

The Fractional Communications Director also typically plays a crucial role in developing and implementing your non-profit’s fundraising strategies. The work may involve creating compelling fundraising campaigns that optimize online donation processes and leveraging your most powerful digital channels to ensure you acquire enough new donors and keep them on board.

As we all know, great marketing efforts focus on community; building community is another responsibility of digital directors. They work on building and nurturing an online community around the organization’s mission. This work involves fostering engagement, responding to inquiries, and cultivating relationships with your non-profit’s supporters, volunteers, and internal and external stakeholders.

Building great communities around your non-profit requires that you stay on top of the most current marketing strategies and the trends, tools, and technologies specifically relevant to your niche which make the most sense to grab to apply to your broader marketing strategy.

Regardless of all the above, there’s no more important characteristic of a great Fractional Communications Director than a collaborative nature. A good one will actively collaborate with other teams in your organization to ensure a cohesive message and narrative runs throughout your storytelling and that the integration of all of your digital initiatives directly aligns with organizational strategies and goals.

Even with a baseline understanding of the impact a digital director can deliver for your non-profit, you may be a little hesitant to invest still, and that’s understandable!

Beyond the metrics and the “quantitative” stuff, let’s look at the value this person brings to the table in a fractional or, eventually, a full-time capacity.

Why You Should Invest in a Fractional Communications Director?

There are many scenarios where bringing a fractional digital director onto your team makes sense.

Here are six we’ll take a look at in some detail:

1

Your non-profit is in a transitional state where support is needed

2

You have marketing staff who are on maternity or paternity leave

3

You need to add capacity to tackle a new project or one with a larger scope

4

Limited resources make a fractional hire more cost-efficient

5

They bring an objective perspective to the table

6

They provide a faster implementation speed than a full-time hire

Needing Support in a Transitional State

Let’s say your mission is changing. This change could be due to realities of your market or niche, which require you to pivot and shift to keep things moving, or it could be due to influence from your board, mentors, or other external stakeholders who have decision-making power in your organization. No matter the reason, fractional directors can lend an experienced ear to the situation and help you navigate the murky waters of making a pivot so it’s a little more predictable and not so chaotic.

Marketing Staff on Maternity or Paternity Leave

Suppose you have staff members on maternity or paternity leave, even with their best intentions to hand off projects they were working on and keep people in the loop. In that case, it’s possible some deadlines or milestones could get lost in the mix if you don’t have someone there to take up the slack.

A fractional director can immediately pick up this work and keep things moving – following your SOPs – due to their level of experience with similar situations during their careers.

Additional Capacity to Manage Increased Project Scope

Even though it’s a good problem, sometimes, things can get a little overwhelming when you add scope to a project with an existing client or a new client comes on board with a large scope. An experienced fractional director can quickly identify, outline and execute a plan of action to ensure you confidently tackle and strategically tackle the new scope.

Limited Resources Make a Fractional Hire More Cost Efficient

When you’re adding scope to existing projects or bringing on new clients, it may be tempting to spring for a full-time Communications Director, anticipating that this uptick will be the “new normal.” As we all know, things can be volatile in the non-profit world.

Therefore, bringing on a fractional director is more cost-efficient in the short term and more strategically sound in the long term until you can model demand and get a feel for how consistent it is for you year over year so that you can plan your headcount accordingly.

An Objective Perspective and the Ability to Move Quickly

The most important combination of skills that fractional directors bring to the table is their inherent objectivity and ability to move quickly. When you hire someone in a fractional capacity, they come in without preconceived notions about your organization. They aren’t influenced by the same internal political factors which full-time hires can be.

Because of this objectivity, they can naturally move more freely, and free movement in the organization equals speed. When the fractional director can move quickly, you will get more from your investment because they don’t take nearly as long to ramp up.

You shouldn’t just hire any fractional digital director, however. You need to vet their skill set, experience, and soft skills to ensure they’re the right fit.

How to Properly Evaluate Potential Communications Directors

There’s an important combination of hard and soft skills to consider when evaluating potential digital directors joining your non-profit.

They should have the applicable “hard skills” like understanding the digital landscape, including SEO, SEM, social media, email marketing, website analytics, brand strategy, etc.

But hard skills aren’t everything. We’d even argue “soft skills” are more important in a non-profit environment than in other traditional for-profit settings.

Here are some of the soft skills you also need to vet for:

Creativity and Innovation

Do they have a history of making magic from limited resources and small staff?

Leadership Skills

The ability to lead teams in good and bad times

Communication Skills

Both written and verbal

Flexibility and Adaptability

In non-profits, change is the only constant

It goes without saying that your fractional director should be able to handle multiple projects simultaneously, bouncing between them seamlessly and shifting on the fly depending on the priorities that arise. It’s a non-negotiable.

They also should have natural relationship-building abilities. Building coalitions of support and establishing and maintaining strong relationships with all types of stakeholders is a daily part of the job. If this innate ability isn’t there, the rest of what we’ve outlined above is a moot point.

You must also set up your new fractional director for success by having all the pieces in place for them to hit the ground running.

After all, you don’t have any time to waste (especially not their time)!

Setting Your New Fractional Director Up for Success

None of us like to start a new project where there’s unclear direction about expectations and onboarding is shaky and unorganized.

Therefore, there are a few things you need to do to make sure you’re setting your new fractional director up for success from the get-go:

1

Ensure they have a clear expectation of the primary KPIs they’re responsible for in their role and how those KPIs relate to those at the organizational level.

2

And not only that there are long-term KPIs, but also short-term expectations they’ll be working toward (where should they be in 60 days? 90 days? 2 quarters?)

3

Provide them with all the tools (technological and otherwise) they’ll need to make an immediate impact (you don’t want to waste their time by forcing them to patch this together on their own).

4

Set meetings with all of your team members so they can get a lay of the land in their first week or two. Everyone should clearly understand who they are and their task, and vice versa.

These four steps are a great start to ensure no wasted time. Add whatever else is necessary to ensure your new fractional director feels welcomed and is ready to work and be productive as quickly as possible!

At Team DB, we are passionate about helping non-profits in a fractional capacity when needed, especially in creative operations, and helping them develop a foundation from which to work to ignite activism and drive social change.

To learn more about our work and schedule a chat, click the link below.

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