3 Skills for Landing a Nonprofit Communications Job

No matter where you are in your career—undergraduate student, mid-career professional, or aspiring sector switcher looking to find a nonprofit job—you probably have some useful skills up your sleeve. Well, for those of you interested in finding a nonprofit communications job, today’s your lucky day.

We’re going over the ins and outs of nonprofit comms—common job titles, required skills, and what to include in your application materials. Stick around for the end of this blog post where we talk about salary expectations!

The job description

Nonprofit communications jobs involve creating and delivering the messaging that support an organization’s mission and goals. These roles can be tasked with developing communication strategies; managing social media accounts, writing press releases, newsletters, and blog posts; and coordinating public relations activities.

Like many nonprofit jobs, you can join a communications department at any level, assuming you have the required skills. Here are some common titles that will likely pop up during your search on Idealist:

• Communications Associate or Coordinator
• Marketing or Social Media Specialist
• Communications Manager
• Director or Marketing and Communications

3 skills for landing a nonprofit communications job

Writing

Every nonprofit communications job requires you to have excellent written communication skills—how else can you showcase an organization’s mission, values, and impact to its audience? Demonstrating this skill to hiring organizations will also require attention to detail.

If you worked at your college newspaper or submitted freelance articles to a local publication, include clippings of your best work in application materials. Often, hiring managers will ask for samples of written work to be shared in a PDF, but you may also want to create an online portfolio to link in your resume.

If you don’t currently have any written examples of your work, consider taking the time to draft something specific to the organization. A sample social media campaign or blog post can go a long way when demonstrating the value you’ll bring to their comms team.

Digital Awareness

In today’s age, having an understanding of commonly-used digital platforms is expected for a nonprofit communications job. In fact, having knowledge of some of the newer tools out there can help you showcase that you’re tapped into the field and can work efficiently.

Depending on whether you’re applying for a role focused on social media, development, content strategy, or email marketing, take a few days to research the tools that are most used in these roles. Hootsuite, Moz, Salesforce, and Sprout Social all have useful YouTube profiles that go over the ins and outs of their platforms.

Demonstrating your proficiency in (or eagerness to learn) these tools is as simple as putting them on your resume. Did you schedule social media posts at the literary magazine you interned for last year, or maybe you tracked the engagement rates for your former organization’s newsletter each month?

Even if you only have personal experience to share with hiring managers, take the time to add these digital tools to your skillset. Don’t be afraid to talk about using Wordpress for your personal blog if the job description requires familiarity with a CMS.  

Meeting Deadlines

Perhaps an underrated skill, meeting deadlines is something that can really set you apart from the crowd. Think about it—an August newsletter that is sent in September is bad, and a donation request email that is sent after the giving campaign ends is worse.

If it makes sense for the job you’re applying for, talk about the project management tools that help you keep track of your work and deadlines. Whether Asana is your best friend or plain ‘ole paper and pen, you want to showcase that meeting deadlines is important to you.

Nonprofit communications salaries

When considering a career in nonprofit communications, it's essential to know the salary expectations to make informed decisions about your future. Role location, years of experience, and the type of organization are all important factors when it comes to determining salary; in fact, these are exactly the kinds of questions we ask social-impact professionals in our salary survey to chart nonprofit salaries across the United States.

Using data from real people across the sector, we’ve determined that entry-level nonprofit communications jobs can range from $40,000 to $63,000 a year, while higher-level roles can pay anywhere between $90,000 to $150,000.

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To launch your career in nonprofit communications, start exploring available roles on our nonprofit job board today!