Before an organisation can communicate clearly with the outside world, it needs clarity on what it stands for internally. Shared values are often the foundation of effective communications, even though they are rarely discussed that way.
I’ve recently been facilitating some newly-merged nonprofit teams to design their shared organisational values. It’s been a wild ride. Going deep into the theory and practice, I started thinking about the relationship between values and communications.
Making decisions is better with values
I feel like I say this all the time, but here again: AI makes this even more relevant. We’re all tackling the great wave of organisational change around AI. Making big decisions about ethical storytelling, data, security and technologies – this is a great time to check that organisations’ values are up to date, and that they are being used as an actually-helpful decision-making tool.
Communications is often viewed as an external function: media coverage, campaigns, fundraising materials, websites and social media content. But as any comms officer will tell you, some of the most persistent communications challenges aren’t really about what we project externally. The most difficult part of the job is often bridging between internal views – legal, fundraising, CEO office versus programme staff… It can be hard to get anything done, when parts of the organisation are not in agreement.
Sometimes those conflicts stem from a lack of alignment around values.
The values are like an organisational ‘code’ that – when well designed, understood and used – form the basis for decision-making.
Values create consistency, and you know how much we loathe chaos
The other key observation is that as organisations grow, communications becomes more complex.
Not that this is inherently problematic. But without a shared understanding of what the organisation stands for and how it operates, different parts of the team can begin telling different stories, using different language, or making different promises. Nuance is good, but discordance leads to chaos.
This is particularly common in growing nonprofits, foundations and social enterprises, where teams might be growing faster than the structures that contain them – leaving culture to catch up later.
Even though it’s hard to get the focus at the right time, waiting until later to define the culture is dangerous. Shared values help ensure that people across teams make decisions, communicate priorities and represent the organisation in ways that are coherent and authentic, even when each person might be doing vastly different things in their day-to-day job.
And all this is important because audiences do notice when an organisation is projecting inconsistent messages.
OK, external stakeholders may never read an organisation’s values statement. But they experience it. In meetings, partners notice when messages change depending on who they speak to. And participants notice when actions and communications do not align – including practical signals like whether commitments are followed through, and whether communities are genuinely valued.
Trust – the anchor of all good comms – is built through consistency
Edelman’s Trust Barometer has, over time, framed trust around perceptions of competence, integrity and reliability. Values play an important role in all three of these pillars: they shape what an organisation prioritises, what it will not do, and how it behaves when there is pressure to compromise. So when values are understood and embedded, they help create consistency between what an organisation says and what it does.
Strong values make communications easier
One of the less obvious benefits of values work is that it often improves communications efficiency.
When you’re clear about priorities and what we will and won’t sacrifice, teams spend less time debating messaging. Decision-making is faster when there’s a shared framework for evaluating choices. This is not just about comms, but if you already know which audiences matter most for this decision, how to handle safeguards and consent, or how to demonstrate impact authentically – then the rest of the planning is much more efficient. New staff can communicate confidently and more spontaneously, because they understand what the organisation does, why it does it, and what language to use.
Values also help organisations navigate difficult conversations. “They’re only values when they hurt,” as one NGO leader told me. When there is uncertainty about the right message, values can help teams decide what to acknowledge, what evidence they can stand behind, which commitments they can make honestly, and how to communicate with respect.
And underpinning all this is the fact that the strongest communications strategies must be driven directly by the organisation’s goals and its mission. So a well-defined organisational culture based on clear values – well, that’s invaluable for the goals, messaging, tone, measurement, and everything else that makes a comms strategy work.
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AMS helps nonprofits, foundations and social enterprises build communications that stay consistent as teams grow. We work with organisations to create practical communications systems that staff can use in real life. If you are reviewing values or your organisation’s messaging, get in touch to discuss how we can help remove blockers and facilitate progress.
