By Amy Widner

As communicators and marketers, sometimes we get fixated on a few very specific actions we want our audience to take, like signing up for a newsletter or making a donation. Across our industry, there is a growing pressure to demonstrate how our efforts are impacting the bottom line. There is an urge to turn everything into a SMART goal — specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely.

That doesn’t mean we should throw that mentality out entirely. Numbers and charts have their place.

However, it can be helpful to occasionally look up from our weekly reports to remember the big picture. If we’re doing our jobs right, we are building relationships with audiences that will last well beyond this week’s report or next month’s campaign. And if you work in the higher education and nonprofit sectors, like we do at Casual Astronaut, some of those relationships are truly the building blocks of society.

Building Lifelong Relationships

The most direct way to keep this mentality in mind is to always ask, “What’s next?” and ensure you are actually providing the next step, the next way to engage, the next bit of support for your audience.

For example, say you successfully encouraged someone to sign up for your newsletter. What’s next? Where are they on their journey? How do you continue to engage with them? What’s the next action you want to encourage them to take?

This is easier said than done, and we all have a tendency to think in silos, so sometimes a little radical thinking can be helpful.

What if we occasionally thought about our audience with the widest lens possible?

In academic healthcare, for instance, the next time you’re going through your standard marketing checklist to introduce a new physician to the community, take a moment to think through their whole career and the role that relationship-building through communications could play in helping them.

Start small:

• Meet the community; develop a patient base and referral base.
• Spread the word about their research interests so that they connect with collaborators, mentors and mentees.

Get bigger:

• Host a community outreach project or communicate with larger audiences around a focused research and clinical interest.
• Foster research connections on a national and international scale by communicating about their work.

The sky is the limit:

• Accept a major donation from a grateful patient’s family in the physician’s name, with ongoing impact for the institution, state, scientific community and world.
• See your physician scientist build on their collaborative relationships to discover something big — really big. Benefits for all humankind!

This exercise also works for higher education and nonprofit organizations. That student that you’re trying to recruit, what could they do with their life and what could their ongoing relationship with the institution look like? For nonprofits, and the client or audience who is first hearing about your organization, just how dedicated could their relationship become over time?

In short, the next time you catch yourself thinking that you’re working on something that is just about “recruiting” or “newsletter signups” or “onboarding” — step back and imagine for a second that it’s something bigger, just one step in a life-long relationship you’re building between that audience and the institution. Because the truth is, that is what it should be. And if you think this way and zero-in on the gaps you uncover, often you will pinpoint the places where your audiences have been falling through the cracks or simply drifting away, because you didn’t provide that “what’s next” step in the relationship-building process for them.

If we zoom out now and then, we’ll remember that. And keep in mind that thinking big is a “smart” goal too.