There are lots of ways a project manager or creative director can assign and explain a project to those charged with execution. Here’s my least favorite one:

“Hey Frank, can you write our next appeal on topic X? You should be able to find what you need on the website and can we get a draft by next Tuesday?”

In most situations, that kind of casual hand-off is asking for trouble. Except on the simplest of projects, there’s no substitute for a solid, well-written creative memo (or what some call a creative brief.)

The creative memo is the bridge between an overall creative strategy and an individual message or campaign. But how effective that bridge is depends on the creative memo being well conceived and executed.

So, in today’s memo, let’s look at nine essential questions a creative memo must clearly address. 

Nine Questions for Your Next Creative Memo

A perfunctory, just-the-facts creative memo won’t get the job done. If you want it to be a springboard for a persuasive, emotionally engaging message, the memo has to dig deeper.
If you answer these nine key questions, that should help you get there.

However you end up structuring the actual message, it’s best to start your creative memo not with the problem you’re trying to address, but with the objective you’re trying to achieve. It helps you begin with aspiration, not frustration and breaks you out of a static problem/solution formula.

Describe how achieving your goal will make things different and better in ways that really matter. And importantly, answer the “why now?” question. What makes what you’re trying to get done something that needs to happen now and not something that can be easily deferred to some point in the future?

Here’s where your memo introduces the problem and creates the tension that engages your audience. Don’t make it a laundry list of daunting barriers you might encounter. That will immobilize your audience. Focus on one or two key obstacles that are standing in the way of that important achievement you’re after.

This is the place where things can either really connect or go off the rails. The most powerful way to frame a nonprofit message is to build the entire conversation around a compelling case for your audience to step forward and intervene.

But too many messages aren’t presented that way. They come across as reports on an organization’s work with a “how you can help” request thrown in at the end. Write your creative memo in ways that avoid the organization-centered perspective in favor of an audience-centered one.

With your group and its skills, reputation and resources as the vehicle, show your audience how their decision to act can confront the obstacle you’ve described and put the achievement you’re after within reach.

Most creative memos describe the message’s audience in terms of past behavior. If it’s a fundraising appeal, the memo might describe peoples’ prior giving and make clear whether the audience has a record of prior action on the topic at hand. All good information.

But your memo will be far more useful if it also delves into the emotional landscape. Think through what hopes, fears and frustrations will color the way your audience hears your message.  

Most creative messages focus on what you want your audience to do. And that has to be crystal clear. But it will help the creative team craft a more compelling message if the memo also pays attention to how you want your audience to feel.

That’s especially true at two moments in time. The first is when you describe the challenge you’re asking them to address. For example: Are you after excitement that a breakthrough achievement is at hand? Or anger that a dangerous development is on the horizon? 

The clearer your memo is about this emotional element, the easier it will be for the creative team to evoke those emotions.

The second emotional high point revolves around how you want your audience to feel at the moment they take action. Is it pride that they are acting to back up their beliefs, fingers-crossed hope what they are doing will have an impact, or steely determination to keep fighting until the goal is reached.

Each of those options would draw the content and tone of your message in a different direction. That’s why the memo being clear about the emotional reaction you’re after is so critical.

Whenever I write a creative memo, I always include a pitfalls section. If the audience for your message has been well-selected, most of the people you’re reaching out to will be generally disposed to agreeing with your goal. 

Your challenge is to move them from that general sense of support to the specific act at the center of your message. You’re more likely to “close the deal” if you think through and anticipate the barriers to action.

One example: Perhaps people have doubts having invested in efforts similar to yours only to see them fail.  It may not be wise to address that history of failure directly. But your memo should suggest ways to lean into what’s new and different about the current moment of opportunity.

In last week’s memo, I wrote about the attention economy and the fact that, in today’s crowded informational landscape, gaining and holding peoples’ attention is a central challenge in nonprofit communications.

Your creative memo shouldn’t just treat that reality as backdrop. It should explicitly answer the question above. And, if that answer isn’t very convincing, keep reworking your memo until you have a more compelling way to gain and hold peoples’ attention.

Answering this question may help answer the attention one. Most compelling messages don’t just roll along on an even keel from start to finish. They feature a dramatic high point. That can take the form of a powerful personal story, a vivid “can’t get it out of my head” image or a surprising fact that upends your audience’s sense of the situation.

Locating that pivotal moment that can anchor your entire message is a central task of the creative memo.

Hopefully, working to answer these nine questions in your next creative memo will help your creative team develop genuinely persuasive messages that can break through in these challenging times.