Be Real and Cut the Jargon

Are you hoping your “donor-centric” approach will create a “targeted impact” for “all stakeholders?”  If so, you may be in the grips of jargon-itis.

Here are common symptoms:

• A large number of words are spoken, but nothing of value is said.

• A speaker’s main purpose when speaking is to hide the fact that he/she has absolutely nothing to say.

• A speaker doesn’t feel authorized to say anything real or specific outside the confines of his/her own basement.

• Listeners, although human-seeming, cannot be distinguished from plant life due to their utter disengagement and motionlessness.

• Words of less than 10 letters seem to have been outlawed.

• Fresh-faced interns are losing their moxie at frightening speeds.

If these sound familiar, your organization is in trouble.

Now, we realize that some areas of nonprofit work use specialized terms.  That’s fine.  But meaningless corporate jargon should always be kept to a minimum.  It wastes time, obscures the point, alienates listeners, and probably contributes to global warming, somehow.

We came to the nonprofit world to more human, not less.  If we wanted to use corporate buzzwords all day, we would have stayed at Business, Inc., slaving away to meet earnings goals and push the chairman’s stock price up another half-tick.

But we didn’t.  So let’s simply walk the walk, and leave talking the talk to the corporate folks.

How can you change?  Here are a few phrase substitutions that will get you in the right frame of mind:

Keep it real, and you’ll be on the fast track to realigning your internal communications strategy to a more listener-friendly paradigm going forward.

Oh, wait.  We mean:

Keep it real, and people in your organization and community will start listening to each other instead of tuning each other out.

That’s better.