Telling people outside your association who you are

External communications covers everything your association says about itself to the world outside it – to potential members and volunteers, to other associations, to the university, to funders and sponsors, to the press, and to anyone who happens to come across you. This is where your purpose, your mission and the change you're working for stop being an internal understanding and become something other people can actually grasp, recognise themselves in, and decide whether they want to be part of.

It covers both the ongoing, everyday communication – posts, updates, your website if you have one – and the concentrated efforts you make around a specific event, campaign or recruitment drive.

Being good at something isn't the same as being seen

Plenty of associations do genuinely valuable work and still get overlooked, simply because nothing about them makes it clear from the outside who they are or what they actually do. It's easy to forget how little context an outsider has: a lot of communication is written for the people already in the room, and to anyone else it reads like a closed circle they'd be intruding on – or at least don't understand enough to know how or why to invite themselves in.

There's also a consistency problem. Without an agreed sense of what you're saying about yourselves, communication ends up depending on whoever happens to be writing that day – so the association comes across differently every time, and no clear impression builds up over time.

When it becomes urgent

This is ongoing work, but it tends to move up the priority list at particular moments: during recruitment periods, in the run-up to an event you need people to actually show up to, and when you're approaching funders, sponsors or partners who need to understand you quickly and be convinced.

What the work consists of

• Sharpening what you actually want to say. A surprising amount of communication work is really the work of deciding what the point is – and saying it clearly enough that someone outside your association gets it immediately. This is harder than it sounds, and it's worth treating as its own task rather than something that resolves itself while writing a post.

• Agreeing on a shared story about who you are. Having a common version of what you're about, which everyone can draw from and adapt, is what makes your communication recognisable over time rather than a series of unrelated messages.

• Setting a direction, and planning accordingly. Communication works better when it isn't decided message by message: agreeing on who you're trying to reach, what you want them to understand, and roughly when things need to go out gives everything else something to hang on. In practice this is both a strategic question – who and why – and a practical one, closer to a calendar: what's coming up, what needs preparing, and when.

• Running campaigns and recruitment efforts. Attracting new members is rarely the result of a single message, but of a coordinated effort with a sense of sequence and shared responsibility. Thinking of it as a campaign rather than a task tends to make the difference.

• Communicating and marketing your events. Getting people to actually turn up is a discipline of its own, and one of the most common reasons good events end up under-attended. It's worth being deliberate about who an event is for and why it's worth their evening.

• Keeping your material ready to hand. Logos, images, standard descriptions, key numbers about your work – having these collected somewhere shared is what lets you respond quickly and consistently instead of rebuilding from scratch each time.

• Being deliberate about where you show up. Choosing fewer channels and using them well tends to work better than being present everywhere, particularly when everyone involved is a volunteer with limited time.

• Adapting to different audiences. Funders, new students and journalists need the same association explained in different ways – what you stand for shouldn't shift, but what you lead with should.

• Being prepared for the difficult situations. Occasionally something goes wrong and needs a response. Having thought about who speaks for the association, and agreed that you'll get the facts straight first, is worth far more than improvising under pressure.

Where communication typically goes wrong

• Spread too thin. Trying to maintain a presence everywhere usually means several channels quietly go dormant – and a half-abandoned profile suggests to a visitor that the association might be half-abandoned too. This is usually a sign that it's worth stepping back and deciding deliberately which channels and platforms you want to be active on, and which people you're actually trying to reach through each of them.

• Written for insiders. Communication that assumes shared context is pleasant for the people who have it and quietly excluding for everyone else, which is precisely the group you're trying to reach.

• Only speaking up when you need something. If communication only happens when there's something to promote, the association reads as a series of requests rather than something worth following – and the audience you need during a push is smaller than it could have been.

• Reacting before you understand. Responding to a difficult situation too quickly is one of the more reliable ways to turn a small problem into a larger one.

• Held by one person alone. When communication depends entirely on one person's knowledge, access and instincts, an association can lose its entire external voice the semester they graduate. The remedy is fairly ordinary: planning that more than one person is part of, simple routines for who does what, and writing enough down – logins, tone, past material, contacts – that someone else can pick it up.

Where good intentions turn into results

However clear your purpose is, however well you look after your volunteers, and however strong your events and project ideas are, none of it reaches anyone unless you can explain it in a way the outside world understands. This is the work that carries everything else across the line and usually what makes the rest possible: it draws directly on the purpose of your organisation – your mission and sense of what makes you distinct are the raw material, and communication is largely the job of translating them for people who don't know you yet. It's the first contact most people have with you, so it does much of the early work for recruiting members and volunteers, how you fill the room for events, and it's a large part of what convinces the people you approach in fundraising and partnerships.