My book group is reading Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” If this title sounds familiar, it’s because Chua is the Chinese mother who famously never allowed her children to attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, get any grade less than an A.” Her book sparked a national debate about ‘extreme parenting.’
But this article is about the book’s lessons for nonprofit communicators. While nobody wants to be seen as a ‘Tiger Mother”
, there are lots of tips we can learn fromI picked up some good tips from Chua’s parenting techniques. Here are my top three: Focus on
your target audience. Chua’s audience is her daughters. She doesn’t allow herself to get distracted by her neighbors, her friends, her children’s friends, even her husband. This means she can focus her messages clearly and exclusively on her target audience of two. Her strategies are designed to work with them, and are not affected by any other audiences’ response.
Set audacious goals. When her daughter Sophie was very young, Chua decided the child should become a concert pianist. She forced Sophie to practice every day for hours. It wasn’t great parenting, but it did lead to big success in concert halls around the world. You can’t get big results if you only set small goals.
Pay attention to detail. Chua demands perfection in every musical note, every math problem and every vocabulary word. How many press releases, blog posting and even resumes have you seen with typos in them? A couple of typos can really mess with your credibility. Chua certainly knows how to avoid this.
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