A Guest Post by Elizabeth Turnbull, a Guest Expert in the“Writing for Nonprofits” Coaching Program

Whenever you travel and are in a new culture, it’s always a good idea to stay quiet for a while and listen before you speak. Look around you and observe how people greet one another. What do they say when they leave? How do they thank each other? What words are taboo?

Asking these questions will help prevent you from sticking the proverbial foot your mouth. And they’ll give you a more rewarding experience throughout your journey.

For someone transitioning from a “traditional” job, nonprofits are a new culture in and of themselves. They’re not businesses, though they seek money to grow. They’re not government programs, though they offer many basic services to the public. They’re not necessarily churches or temples though many are faith-based.

Nonprofits are their own culture, seated somewhere in an uneasy space of financial transactions and deeply rooted convictions. To further muddy the waters, each nonprofit has its own sub-culture and one food bank may very well have a totally different communications approach than the food bank just a few streets away.

If you want to work with nonprofits, you’ll be wise to listen before you speak.

• Read through the existing materials. What vocabulary do they use? How do they sign off from letters? How do they thank donors? What works and what has to change?

• Read through the materials of like-minded organizations (that’s nonprofit-speak, for “scope out the competition”). What do they do better? Worse? Differently?

• Ask if there are words the organization doesn’t use. Some organizations feel very passionately about vocabulary, and there could be a long list of “taboo” phrases. If you unwittingly use one in your writing, you might step on some toes, and you’ll definitely look out of touch.

• Sit in on meetings and spend time at the office whenever possible. Watching the interactions of staff and the people they serve will fill you with useful information and make your job so much easier.

I’ve worked with a variety of nonprofits during the past five years and no two approach communication the same way — even those with “like-minded missions.” But they have all been extremely appreciative and helpful when I stop, listen, and ask a few basic questions before I step in as their voice.

By listening before you speak, you’ll learn the cultures of your nonprofit clients (including their donors) and help them share their stories in a way that’s meaningful, moving and effective.

The Writing for Nonprofits Coaching Program is a month of training and coaching to grow your freelance business and nonprofit clientele. Session starts April 26, 2010. Get the details and register.

I figure outlining has cost me about a month’s worth of time that could have been spent actually writing this book.

Last month, as I really got into this project, I started to get obsessed with the book outline, because I was getting so many comments from well-meaning friends about how important it was to really flesh out the outline in great detail for a project this big.

I listened, and frittered away many hours working on the thing, frustrated all the while, shuffling the decks and not making any significant progress.

What I failed to take into account is that I DON’T WRITE THAT WAY!

Outlines work for me in a very general, macro sort of way. If I’m writing 1,000 words, I might create an outline in my head of  three or four items. Say this, talk about that, example here, etc. And I do have the equivalent of that kind of outline for this book, with five-six subheadings per chapter. But trying to get deeper than that in the outline is where things go awry.

I just need to write the damn thing. I know what I need to say. I need to get it out. Then I go back, see what I have, fill in gaps, then re-order everything and cut out what doesn’t fit. In other words, I’m a much better organizer than outliner.

So, I’m back to what works for me. I’m just doing it. I’m much happier, and the book is coming along at a much better pace.

All freelancers who write not just for pleasure but to pay the bills as well have learned one important skill and have successfully put it to work: repurposing content. There is absolutely no shame in recycling your material, as long as (1) you own the copyright (i.e. you haven’t sold all rights to a magazine or written as work-made-for-hire for a client) and (2) you invest a bit of time in making substantive changes.

Say you are a blogger. Where else do you write for publication? Your blog posts could be recycled into articles for your or a client’s website, print newsletter, e-newsletter, press release, e-book, workshop lesson plan, etc.

Use one or more of these techniques to freshen up your original article each time you use it elsewhere.

Change the angle. If you emphasized one particular element of the story, emphasize a new one now. If you told the story from one person’s perspective, tell it from the perspective of someone else in the story.

Change the person. If you wrote the article in third person (“She walked away . . .”), change the article to a first-person account (“I walked away . . .”). You’ll need to ensure that the person telling the story approves the new version told from her point of view.

Make it shorter. Cut out some of the extra details and focus in on just one key point or message.

Make it longer. Add in some additional material from your original research or interview notes.

Rewrite the lead paragraph. Start the article in a new way.

Turn it into a how-to article. What did the story’s participants learn and can that be shared with others? Turn those lessons into a how-to or step-by-step article for others.

Get the most out of the time you spend researching and writing articles by using that material in many different ways.

Need an example? This article is repurposed from one I just wrote on my other blog, Nonprofit Communications. That version emphasizes how nonprofits can recycle their best stories to market their organizations in different ways. To recycle that post for this blog, I pulled out one of the four steps from that article, changed some of the wording to address freelance writers instead of nonprofits, and added a new title and lead paragraph. I spent nearly an hour drafting the first post, but only ten minutes on this one. See how well this can work?