From cancer centers to climate organizations, the nonprofit sector is diverse. Nonprofits across the world span issue areas, bases, scope, size, audiences, and function. The sector is as diverse as that of the business sector, which houses companies from Patagonia to Exxon Mobil.
Right now though, sharing a common sector means that nonprofits across the globe have another commonality—an alarming one for our sector: According to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, people trust businesses more than nonprofits.
This wasn’t always the case. As recently as 2020, people trusted nonprofits more than businesses, which begs the question: Why do people trust businesses more than nonprofits now, even though the bottom line for nonprofits—social impact—hasn’t changed? We work in the nonprofit sector not for profit, but for progress, after all.
The Edelman Trust Barometer is the standard-setting pulse check on popular sentiment regarding the nonprofit, business, government, and media sectors. It’s not necessarily granular, but as a sector, we’d be remiss to ignore the findings of the report—especially when they alert us to a trust decline in nonprofits. Both nonprofits looking to build trust and nonprofits looking to maintain trust can benefit from understanding the sentiment surrounding our sector in positioning our brands.
When we first learned about this trust dip here at Constructive, we were surprised. We know the good of the sector. Everyday, we work with people who make sacrifices to advance healthcare access, educational equity, solutions to climate change, and so many more of the tools needed to build a better, more just world. We know the power of nonprofits, especially those whose brands authentically engage and interact with their communities.
So why do people trust businesses more than nonprofits?
As the saying goes, “Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.” Right now, our sector has an incredible opportunity at hand: we have the opportunity to rebuild or fortify public trust in our brands. If we’re looking to collectively manage trusted brands that are capable of building the level of trust and motivation needed to achieve our highest aspirations, the implications of a landscape in which people trust businesses more than nonprofits are profound.
And consumer businesses (those that we often think of first when we think of the sector) have somewhat of an advantage here. When someone buys something from a business, they get a tangible product or service in return—and so, a relationship with a brand is sparked. At risk of oversimplification, nonprofits don’t necessarily deliver products or services. What we do deliver, is a relationship with a brand, onebuilt on the trust that the nonprofit is capable of and working toward something the audience finds valuable.
Without that trust, we can’t cultivate an engaged audience, foster enduringrelationships, or build the momentum needed to enact long-term social change. Our capacity to advance social change hinges on our understanding of the public’s perceptions: our audiences, members, donors, stakeholders, and constituents—plus all of their communities.
So when it comes to building that trust for nonprofits, brand perception matters. The way that people feel about your brand is an excellent barometer of trust in your organization. And brands are like people, people often make judgements based on first impressions that go a long way towards quickly determining if they trust or distrust a brand. Building alignment between your brand and your organization’s activities is essential to building trust in your nonprofit.
And nonprofits don’t exist in a vacuum. The trust in our brand and our organizations is influenced by inflation, natural disasters, climate crises, geopolitical unrest, and more. So we’re breaking down the Edelman Report, and sharing key findings for nonprofits from the latest public temperature check. We’ll explore strengths for nonprofits, like the rising interest in social impact amongst Gen Z, as well as weaknesses, like what messaging alienates people and why?
With polarization at all-time highs, trust at all-time lows, and an election year quickly approaching, the stakes couldn’t be higher for nonprofit brands to build the trust and brand engagement needed to continue putting progress over profit.
Strengths for Nonprofit Brands:
In a world struggling to address issues of climate, political polarization, and income disparities, people want to advance social progress. The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Report sheds light on sector-specific advantages for nonprofits amidst a social impact awakening. The report reveals three key areas where nonprofits brands excel: a growing interest in social impact, the sector’s ethical standing, and the sector possessing the building blocks of public trust. Nonprofit brands, if they harness these strengths, can build the bridges our polarized world so desperately needs.
1. More people are interested in social impact—for engagement and employment.
One of the greatest strengths for nonprofit brands outlined in the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Report is that people—in their consumption and their production—are interested in advancing social impact. The latest report shows that 63% of people are willing to buy or advocate for brands based on their beliefs and values (Edelman 2023, 28). That’s a 5-point increase in just one year (Edelman 2022, 26), a year in which 52% of people said that capitalism’s harms outweigh its goods (Edelman 2022, 23).
Social issues are increasingly top of mind. In fact, researchers are predicting that Gen Z may be one of the most charitable generations yet. Of all the generations, members of Gen Z “are the most likely to say they donate because they feel it’s just the right thing to do.” Increased politicization and polarization of everyday issues is dangerous, full stop. But the growing awareness of issues of politics, climate, and human rights are breeding a more engaged, social impact-oriented populace.
These strengthening social contracts between people and the organizations (businesses and nonprofit brands) that they engage with extend beyond advocacy or consumption. More and more people want to work for an ethical bottom line. According to the 2023 Report, 69% of people believe that having a societal impact is a strong expectation or even a deal breaker when considering a job (Edelman 2023, 28).
Where millennials entered the job market during a once-in-a-century downturn, Gen Z entered during a once-in-a-century pandemic, a moment of upheaval and social reckoning. Gen Z wants to see companies commit—and stick to—their DEI commitments and ESG goals. The “green collar” revolution is here, and people are more than willing to take pay cuts to put their time and energy in the impact space. When nonprofits authentically embody the values of a social impact-oriented audience, they can build relationships with audiences and employees that are founded on a shared understanding of the nonprofit’s brand, mission, vision, and goals.
2. Nonprofits are considered the most ethical industry.
If you’re an organization that depends on member, volunteer, or donor engagement, your reputation means everything. One strength from the report is that people view nonprofits in 2023 as the most ethical sector compared to businesses, government, and media (Edelman 2023, 26). Nonprofits earned an ethical score of 22 compared to businesses’ score of 18, media’s -8, and government’s -11.
In the public’s eye, the government and media fuel a cycle of distrust. The majority of people believe that journalists and government officials are divisive forces (Edelman 2023, 21). Nonprofit leaders on the other hand, are viewed more as unifiers—alongside educators and business leaders (Edelman 2023, 21). Nonprofit brands can rally people around causes, it’s in our best interest to unite. With 68% of people believing that brands celebrating what brings us together and emphasizing our common interest would strengthen our social fabric, it’s no wonder why people see nonprofits in 2023 as ethical unifiers (Edelman 2023, 36).
Our social fabric is fraught with polarization and parallel media ecosystems. Sure, many for profit organizations try to appeal to as many people as possible since they have it benefits their bottom line. But for nonprofit brands, uniting people and bridging divides has a higher purpose. When you’re working to solve issues as existential as climate change or problems that require herculean international cooperation, like providing aid to Ukraine, we’re looking at an all hands on deck approach. Crises compel us to set aside differences and embrace collaboration. A problem shared is a problem halved—nonprofits have so much more to gain than boosted sales when we unite people around a common cause.
People care deeply about ethics, about justice, about moral integrity—and they see nonprofits keeping their promises to stakeholders. Take these guidelines from the National Council of Nonprofits:
“It is so important that charitable nonprofits continuously earn the public’s trust through their commitment to ethical principles, transparency, and accountability. If only one community member or donor loses confidence in a charitable nonprofit because the nonprofit behaves unethically, that’s one too many.”
Virtue begets virtue. Nonprofit brands, which have earned the reputation as the most ethical sector, have an inherent advantage: Our bottom line is intangible—we look at our communities, our children’s health, our climate as indicators of success. When we lean into our ethical commitments and authentically embody them in our communications and actions, we can build more trust in our brand and its virtues.
3. Nonprofits already hold the key ingredients to public trust.
Trust is everything in the nonprofit space. As we mentioned, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. One key finding is that nonprofit brands already possess several of the building blocks of public trust. The report demonstrates that nonprofits are seen as the most trustworthy sector, with 51% of people believing that NGOs reliably provide trustworthy information, compared to business’s 48%, media’s 42% and government’s 39% (Edelman 2023, 10).
Aside from people viewing nonprofits as unifiers, lower ethics scores across government, media, and business can be, in part, attributed to the inflammatory nature and newsworthiness of those sectors’ scandals. Take Theranos for example: In 2021, there were 3,755 pieces of news coverage on Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos—and that was before the popular Hulu series, trials, and sentencings.
The cycle of distrust surrounding other sectors—and the mistrust of their information—leaves a gap that nonprofits can fill with unbiased, scientific information. The report finds that a key ingredient to earning that trust: being a trustworthy source of information. People believe that providing high quality information insulates business action from politicization—and that basing action on science breeds trust (Edelman 2023, 34). Leaning into a nonprofit’s commitment to taking evidence-based actions and sharing only high quality research and information can help build or maintain trust in a nonprofit brand.
Weaknesses for Nonprofit Brands:
The 2023 Edelman Report demonstrates strengths for nonprofits, but it also unveils the sector’s struggles—most notably in public trust and political polarization. Individual organizations are left to address these weaknesses, but the sector as a whole must bridge a widening gap between the public and other institutions. All the while, since people trust businesses more than nonprofits, our brands are left playing catch up.
1. People trust businesses more than nonprofits.
In the eye of the public, corporations are more trustworthy than nonprofits. According to the latest report,businesses have a 3-point trust advantage over nonprofits (Edelman 2023, 8). Nonprofits remain more trusted than both governments and the media, but people have turned to businesses to meet their institutional trust needs. And while nonprofits still hold the top ethical spot, this gap has shrunk every year since 2020 (Edelman 2023, 26). Meanwhile, the business sector’s ethic’s score has risen by 19 points in the last three years, placing businesses closer to NGO’s in public perception than ever before. But it gets worse: businesses in 2023 earned a competence score of 11, nonprofits landed at -3—the public does not generally see NGOs as competent at all it seems.
Put simply: people trust businesses more than nonprofits, businesses are outpacing nonprofits in perceived ethical gains, and people believe nonprofits are less competent than businesses.
This general lack of trust in nonprofits’ competence undermines several key nonprofit activities, like collecting individual donations, gaining public support for campaigns, recruiting volunteers, and reaching niche communities. Members of the public who don’t trust nonprofits will be less likely to do things like donate to them, sign petitions for them, stay up to date on their news, or attend events. A 2023 report from Americorps and the US Census Bureau released shows that people were opting to help their neighbors over formal volunteering.
“Nearly 51% of the US population age 16 and over, or 124.7 million people, informally helped their neighbors between September 2020 and 2021 at the high of the pandemic, according to the latest Volunteering and Civic Life in America research released today.
In response to a separate question, more than 23% of people in that age group, or 60.7 million, said they formally volunteered through an organization during the same period.”
The lack of trust could span wider than your member base—the very communities you work to serve might not trust you either. Disadvantaged individuals have largely been failed by large systems and institutions, and what makes your organization’s commitment different from other empty promises? If someone doesn’t trust you, why would they reach out for resources or support?
The operational consequences of lost trust in nonprofit brands are clear, but we must also consider the larger societal consequences of businesses’ rise in the public eye. While many large businesses actually take steps toward increased sustainability and public responsibility, there are also a large number of corporations greenwashing and misleading the public about their commitments. For every one company with concrete sustainability commitments, about two admit to greenwashing their way to the top of the perception pyramid.
With trust in businesses outranking nonprofit brands, consumers might feel satisfied with shopping at a purportedly sustainable company. And it might feel like that purchase checks off their personal social impact duties without ever coming in contact with a nonprofit. Businesses seem to be beating out nonprofits for the public’s time, attention, trust, and dollars. Nonprofits can communicate competence and integrity through their brands and communications to begin winning back the public.
2. Nonprofit brands are forced to pick sides in an ever-polarized world.
The largest drivers of polarization include: a lack of shared identity, a distrust in the government, systemic unfairness, economic pessimism, societal fears, and distrust in the media (Edelman 2023, 17). Polarization is a growing problem in our society, with 53% of respondents believing that their country is more divided now than in the past (Edelman 2023, 20). And the first driver of polarization, lack of shared identity, represents a key weakness for nonprofit brands.
Many nonprofits seek to be a unifying force, one that helps to reinstate shared identity among groups of people. But it seems that the current polarized state of the world is not allowing this to be the case. Nonprofits are instead being forced to pick sides and they are being punished for this in public perception.
While 46% of Edelman respondents said that nonprofit leaders are a unifying force in society that brings people together, 29% of respondents indicated that nonprofit leaders are actually a dividing source, one that exploits and intensifies people’s differences, pulling them apart (Edelman 2023, 21). It seems that with the current state of polarization, working on and speaking out about certain politicized topics such as women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, racism, and more, while incredibly important, represent a bit of a lose-lose situation for nonprofit brands.
Without taking a strong stance, nonprofit brands can lose trust and support from members of the public who are committed to these issues. And their brand, who they are in the eyes of the public, gets hazy and unclear. But in taking a strong stance that can be politicized, nonprofits lose the ability to bring more people into the fold, to unify, which is absolutely necessary for their causes (and some might even lose important funding). As people drift further apart, nonprofits straddle a larger gulf—one that will prove difficult to bridge after losing more public trust.
Opportunities for Nonprofit Brands:
The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Report spotlights a significant trust divide caused by income inequality, and these findings underscore the urgency for nonprofit brands to help restore faith in institutions. With election season around the corner, and all of the heightened political engagement that coincides, nonprofits have the opportunity to create stronger ties to their audience. With our spot at the perceived ethical top, nonprofits have a unique opportunity to communicate their impact effectively, strengthen their feedback loop, and emphasize their commitment to long-term solutions. Capitalizing on these opportunities could make or break the public reputation of nonprofits in the years to come.
1. Nonprofit brands can bridge the trust gap between people and institutions.
Income inequality has created a mass-class divide—and with inequality, we get two rupturing trust realities. Right now, the top 25% of earners in the US give institutions a 63-point trust score, while the lowest 25% give our institutions a measly 40 points (Edelman 2023, 12).
Taken in context, that 23-point gap is a gulf: The US has the second highest income-based trust inequality in the world (Edelman 2023, 12).That polarization is felt more starkly amongst Republicans in the US, with 50% of Republicans saying that our country is entrenched in divisions compared to Democrats’ 33% (Edelman 2023, 18). Then, when the chips are down, among those who feel polarized, their employer is the most trusted institution (Edelman 2023, 27).
We can draw some connections: Poverty breeds distrust in institutions and trust polarization. When the systems and institutions—government, nonprofits, media—designed to elevate your circumstances fail you, who do you trust? You put your employer, the entity that gives you the money to pay your bills, at the top. You don’t bite the hand that feeds. But where’s the opportunity here? Well, nonprofits are also the hand that feeds. Nonprofits work to address systemic injustices, poverty, healthcare gaps, and more. We have the opportunity to better demonstrate that critical work, better explain and expand resources, and make nonprofit care more accessible.
Nonprofits can build on their standing as the most ethical and one of the most competent sectors to bridge the trust gap to improve people’s circumstances. Building on practices like financial transparency and accountability, can win minds. But to win hearts, nonprofit brands can lean into some of other sector-specific strengths. For example, people believe that in order for a business to be trustworthy and non-politically motivated, it should be a trustworthy information source, base actions on science, and act on the same values over time. Nonprofits that abide by these trustworthy practices can strengthen trust in their brands.
The stakes are high: If we succeed, nonprofits can continue their work. If we fail, we lose brand trust, and subsequently, the trust of the people who need our help most. To show people that we have the empathy and the competency to make a tangible difference in their lives. Some resources for demonstrating our impact to build trust are:
2. Nonprofits can create a stronger feedback loop.
When you order something on Amazon, you pay, and in return, you have a package in your hands in two business days. When you give to a nonprofit, what do you get in return?
Right now, nonprofit brands have an incredible opportunity to create a stronger, more tangible feedback loop between donors, members, volunteers, and community members to demonstrate their impact. Volunteering is down, and the days of dropping a dollar in the Salvation Army bin are over. But election season—and the upswing in political and social engagement that comes with it—is right around the corner. People will want to know that the resources they spend for your cause are put to good use, and we can accomplish that with a stronger feedback loop.
Strengthening the feedback loop takes several shapes for a nonprofit brand: messaging, marketing, communications, and community. In terms of messaging, consider putting your nonprofit audience at the center of your story—framing them, and not your nonprofit, as the catalysts in your theory of change. The main reasons people engage with nonprofits are personal. In your branding and in your marketing, a stronger feedback loop looks like more personalized content, consistency, and proof of process. Transparency is king here. Our communications also have to uphold our high standards—surveyed respondents say they might stop donating to an organization because of poor, vague, dull, or irrelevant content. And we should make people feel connected almost instantly to a broader community of people who care about the same cause (check out some resources on this).
To create a stronger feedback loop and connection with our audiences, we have to show, not just tell, people where their money and time is going. We don’t have the luxury of mailing everyday consumer products, but when nonprofit brands strengthen the connection between a brand and its audience, we can clearly deliver meaning, impact, self-actualization, and community to our audiences.
3. Nonprofits can emphasize that we’ve got our sights set on the long-term.
Systemic unfairness is seen as one of the top three drivers of polarization (Edelman 2023, 17). Younger voices want systemic, long-term solutions—not quick fixes. With issues like climate change and systemic racism dominating the top concerns of Gen Z, younger people are interested in building a better future, brick by brick. “They are an activist generation … They take strong positions and expect others, including brands, to do the same.” They’re driving the change they want to see in the world.
Younger generations aren’t interested in quick fixes, or maybe they understand that bandaids won’t solve something like ocean warming. They’re interested in long-term thinking (see the rise of movements like longtermism) and systemic solutions.
The opportunity here for nonprofit brands might be obvious, but it’s worth stating: When relevant, nonprofits brands can lean into their long-term goals and aspirations to address societal issues. When we can communicate that and bring the next generation into the fold, we can begin to address and change the systems that perpetuate violence, poverty, racism, and environmental havoc.
Threats for Nonprofit Brands:
The shifts we’re seeing from even just from 2022 to 2023 don’t bode well for nonprofits. That is, they don’t bode well if we don’t react. We’re seeing a new default in institutional mistrust and ever-growing polarization. Plus, we’re seeing a trust microscope placed on every public entity and everyone. But, these threats are important to know as you leverage current strengths and future opportunities to overcome them.
1. A new norm: Institutions are untrustworthy until proven trustworthy.
The clearest threat to nonprofits—and maybe the most corrosive to our social fabric—is the new perception default: Institutions are untrustworthy until proven trustworthy. In the 2022 Edelman Report, 59% of people surveyed across 24 countries said their tendency is to distrust until they see evidence that something is trustworthy (Edelman 2022, 19).
Goodbye to the benefit of the doubt. Alternative media ecosystems, fake news, and economic instability further divide us from trusting important new information and viewpoints. Imagine if we had a justice system based on this same principle—guilty until proven innocent. Distrust as the default can crumble small communities all the way up to democracies and global systems. It is central to the us vs, them mentality, which silos us off from other people we deem as different from us.
To overcome the threat of making mistrust the default, nonprofits can lean even harder into brand transparency and honesty. Make it clear to the public who your brand is and what you do (and how you spend their donation dollars). The feedback loop that results will quell people’s fears about you. After all, the report asked people if their tendency was to mistrust until they saw evidence otherwise. So show them the necessary evidence otherwise with your brand, build trust in your nonprofit organization while elevating trust in the nonprofit sector.
2. Nonprofits must bridge an ever-widening polarization gap.
While the current state of polarization demonstrates a weakness for nonprofits right now (see above), worsening polarization year over year suggests an even graver threat. Polarization and distrust exist hand-in-hand, or as the Edelman report puts it they are “both cause and consequence.”
Among respondents who indicated that they believe their country is currently polarized with entrenched divisions, their distrust in nonprofits exceeded respondents who found their countries more united, or at least divided but not entrenched (Edelman 2023 report page 19). In other words, there’s a direct correlation between someone’s negative outlook on the state of affairs and their likelihood to trust that things will improve—or that nonprofits can help. Not only is the polarization gap growing, but with the continued growing distrust of the government and the media, nonprofits could be left to pick up the slack.
While this is an opportunity for nonprofits, it’s of course also a threat. This is a time to lean heavily into credible and science-backed information, and show that improvements your nonprofit is making in the lives of your audiences will have positive impacts for everybody. Think about ways to bring more people into the fold while avoiding immobilizing or politicized language. Use framing to your advantage, and be nimble to change how you’re communicating based on how people react.
3. Nonprofits can’t act fast under a trust microscope.
People want the brands they align with to take public stances on their beliefs. This is of course risky business in a polarized society. And since nonprofits are under a trust microscope, in order to express beliefs effectively, organizations must devote lots of time and intentionality to their communications. This poses a threat moving forward because it stymies a nonprofit’s ability to respond to future crises quickly and efficiently.
Nonprofit brands often need to act fast—disasters don’t share deadlines. When an extreme weather event, a humanitarian crisis, or a political rupture unfold, we have to act fast to better serve our communities and stakeholders. While transparency and intentionality are of course important, these things take time and time is of the essence when responding to a crisis. If nonprofits get caught in the weeds of exactly what their communications will look like at the moment of necessity, they might miss the opportunity to help when their constituents need them most.
The public isn’t the only blocker, though. Many large organizations face internal struggles to address more divisive issues. When a nonprofit has an older, more conservative funding source or leadership, giving way to progressive framing can prove difficult. With every step hyper-analyzed by the public and maybe also by leadership, some NGOs might be frozen in place with a great deal of mixed opinions on how to move forward. If your brand is not fully fleshed out or communicated to your staff or your public, people cannot give your communications the benefit of the doubt. They don’t have the necessary context or perception of your brand to see where you are coming from.
No organization is perfect and no communication strategy is fool-proof. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Crisis communications exist for a reason and nonprofits are in no short supply of thoughtful, strong communicators. Trust them, focus on internal organization alignment by having discussions internally, and once again listen to feedback to overcome bumps in the road as they arise.
Closing thoughts:
In a world where trust is scarce and polarization runs deep, nonprofit brands have the opportunity to bridge societal gaps and help restore faith in institutions. The 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Report highlights both the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for the nonprofit sector. Sure, nonprofits are playing trust catch up against businesses, but nonprofit brands possess unique strengths that can pave the way for progress. With growing interest in social impact, a reputation for ethical leadership, and the building blocks of public trust, can build bridges and unite our polarized populace toward our bottom line: progress.
The average visitor spends less than 15 seconds on a website before leaving for another site. Think about the last time you visited a website for the first time. Did it pass the 15-second rule? If not, why’d you click away? Was it missing information? Was it confusing to navigate or maybe too slow to load? When you think about your nonprofit website, why might users not give it a passing grade in 15 seconds?
Evaluating the user experience on a webpage you designed is like proofreading your own writing. Proximity is the enemy of objectivity. You, the creator or manager, have a lot more context on your organization’s website. Your brain just might be too familiar with your work to catch errors. Our views, habits as website users, and biases often affect our nonprofit websites. The cure? User testing.
User experience testing helps demonstrate the successes and flaws of your site. The best users to test with are real-life members of your nonprofit audience. This includes members, funders, donors, partners, and other stakeholders. Websites are often the primary way we connect with the communities we serve, so user testing is key. It’s even more critical for nonprofits with niche target audiences, like specific regional communities.
There are plenty of tools to track user experience and on-page website analytics. At Constructive, we use Crazy Egg to track our clients’ website data to improve digital design, content, and the overall website user experience. To make your nonprofit website as user-friendly as possible, we need to understand:
Who makes up your website audience?
Does your website’s navigation work for users?
What are your website’s goals?
What is your current website’s ability to meet those goals?
If you can answer these questions, you can optimize your site through on-page analytics. Let’s explore what we can learn from Crazy Egg and other tracking tools to make your nonprofit website’s user experience seamless.
What Are On-Page Website Analytics?
On-page website analytics help you understand how visitors interact with specific elements on your website. Are people scrolling down on the page? Are they utilizing informational carousels or expanding prompts? Are they clicking on button elements—or mistakenly trying to click on elements that aren’t interactive?
Tools like Crazy Egg and other similar platforms provide detailed insights into these interactions by tracking user behavior in real-time. Unlike traditional user testing, which requires recruiting participants, these tools collect data from your actual website visitors, offering a more accurate picture of how people navigate your site.
To get started, we add a tracking code to your web page and begin tracking the experiences of your website visitors. This generates a snapshot of user behavior, allowing us to analyze trends and identify areas for improvement.
In this article, we’ll explore key on-page metrics and how you can use this data to enhance your website’s user experience.
Measuring Your Nonprofit Website Analytics
Using Heatmaps on Nonprofit Websites
A heatmap shows you where users interact with your page.
Heatmaps are exactly what they sound like: infrared colored heat maps showing the areas of your website where visitor clicks are the most concentrated. The closer to white a heated area is, the more visitors have clicked on that portion of your web page.
The heatmap is an intuitive and visual way to understand what parts of your web page people are engaging with and parts being completely ignored. In this way, it can immediately identify glaring differences between how you designed the page and how website visitors use it. This can give you actionable insights into how to increase your web page’s user experience.
For instance, in looking at a homepage heatmap for a client, I saw an interesting phenomenon: Website visitors were hardly utilizing the website’s primary navigation system but instead scrolling all the way to the bottom of the homepage and clicking around the footer. The heatmap clearly showed us that users struggled to understand the website’s navigation. With these insights in hand, we recommended navigation changes that would optimize people’s experiences moving from their homepage to other pages on the website.
Using Scrollmaps to Analyze Your Site
A scrollmap demonstrates engagement and viewing patterns on webpages.
Scrollmaps go hand in hand with heatmaps. They show us how and if users are scrolling down your page and what areas of your web page garner the most impressions (views on the screen). Similar to the heatmap, the scrollmap shows us impression levels using a color heat spectrum.
The scrollmap gives us great insight into whether people are really looking at your web page past the average fold, which is the average place across different devices where the initial view of your web page ends.
So, if your page impressions are dropping off here (something I see on a lot of web pages), it means that very few website visitors are scrolling down your page at all. Instead, they’re just looking at the page header and either interacting with that or immediately leaving the page (also known as bouncing).
If there is a clear place on the page where users are losing interest and dropping off, we can identify this and make recommendations for moving page elements or reducing the page length. For instance, in recently looking at a web page for a client on both desktop and mobile, I noticed that on desktop, the scrollmap for the page was strong. Users were scrolling all the way to the bottom. While on mobile, users dropped off about halfway down the page—and steeply. The mobile page was much longer due to stacking images and elements, and we could see how this current configuration was encouraging users to abandon the page. We could then recommend creating a streamlined version of the web page. In this shorter version for mobile, the site would reduce the amount of users who don’t scroll to the end of the page while making users’ experiences better.
Understanding Dead Clicks and Rage Clicks
Click reports show you where areas or elements that users click on your website.
Two of the most interesting on-page website analytics that we also can look at when utilizing Crazy Egg are “dead clicks” and “rage clicks.”
Dead clicks represent when website visitors are clicking on non-interactive elements on your web page. So, for example, they click something that they think is a button but is really just a non-interactive element. These clicks suggest that visitors expect these elements to be interactive.
Rage clicks similarly exhibit user frustration with your website. Rage clicks represent when users are repeatedly clicking on an element, which means that this element is not reacting the way that they expect. (Rage clicks are essentially dead clicks that people are repeating over and over).
Together, these metrics allow us to understand what parts of your web page are pain points for website users, and thus, we can reduce these areas of frustration.
I came across an eye-opening example of dead and rage clicks while tracking a small events calendar page for a client. On Crazy Egg, we could see large clusters of rage clicks all across the calendar, specifically on the dates where events were listed. This calendar element was non-responsive. Still, users assumed it was an interactive element that they could click into to learn more information about the future events. After clicking the area once and not getting a response, users kept clicking the area out of frustration over and over again. But, thanks to these analytics, we were able to recommend making this calendar responsive, with active links and expansions.
Detailed Click Reports
In addition to the higher level view of the heatmap, Crazy Egg also offers us multiple more detailed click reports so we can see just about every place on our webpage a user has pressed down on their cursor.
The confetti click report allows us to segment clicks based on multiple categories. We can sort based on referral origins, user country, visiting frequency, search engine origins, and many other categories (this report is also where we can pull out dead and rage clicks!).
The overlay report shows the web page with an overlay describing the exact number of user clicks shown over each element on the page.
And the list report allows us to look at a stacked list of the highest engaged with and lowest engaged with elements on the page along with the percentage of overall clicks they make up.
The list report I often find especially helpful in giving detailed information on web pages. Recently, in looking at a resource page for a client, this report allowed me to give them a stacked list of the exact number of people who clicked on each of their educational resources on the page. I could then let them know which resources users were most interested in and which topics they could confidently continue to publish new content on. I could also help them to brainstorm ways to better elevate and present resources that were receiving less engagement from users.
Page Loading Speed, Page Bounce Rate, and Page Errors
Page load speed, page bounce rate, and page errors all let us know whether our web page is working correctly or has any technical issues. Before we dive deeper into these metrics, let’s clarify some terms:
The median page load speed represents the average amount of time it takes for your web page’s initial elements to appear.
Bounce rate represents the percentage of users who immediately leave your web page without completing any actions.
These two metrics work hand in hand. The higher your median page load speed is, the more likely your bounce rate is to be high because people get impatient and give up on your website. Crazy Egg will also let us know if there were any significant technical errors taking place on our page. Sometimes, Crazy Egg will even save you a recorded video of a user who experienced an error’s website session so you can understand what went wrong with your page.
I recently saw a web page with a surprisingly low amount of web sessions given the general traffic trend of this website. Upon looking at the page load speed and bounce rate, I began to understand the small number of sessions more; the page was loading slowly, leading website users to abandon it before it even loaded. We were able to recommend that elements on the page (looking out primarily for image and video sizing!) be looked at closely to determine the cause of the slow loading and fix it.
Clicks Engagements by Channel and User Type
When I review nonprofit websites, I also like to look at the overall number of clicks on a web page. Crazy Egg breaks down clicks by categories, such as the channel users are coming from, whether a user is new or returning, which search engine users are coming from, and more.
I find that looking at clicks this way helps to explain what type of users most of your engagements are coming from, rather than just what types of users your page views are coming from. For example, if you have swaths of users coming from organic search with low click engagement, you should consider how to better capture their interest.
The new vs. returning metric specifically really helps us to determine whether people are finding a web page useful (and thus returning to it later). With one partner, we found that most of their site’s pages had a vast majority of click engagements from first-time users. Their one resource page showed the exact opposite. More than 75% of the clicks on this page were from returning users. This page is extremely valuable to folks noting it down and returning later to continue looking for new resources. We recommended making the navigation to this page across the website very clear so that people looking for the page could easily find it. In doing so, we elevated a very valuable page for them.
Now That We Know What to Measure, Here’s What We Should Consider
While on-page analytics may seem a little granular (because they are!), the insights they provide can have critical implications for your website, your digital service design, and your brand. Once you understand your heatmaps, scrollmaps, dead or rage clicks, and more, you can target and specialize your optimization.
Beyond simple changes that on-page analytics can suggest we make (such as moving elements up and down the page, altering element sizes or style, etc.), these analytics can give us insights into how people are using your website more widely. They get us thinking about things like:
Who exactly is your nonprofit website audience?
On-page analytics might show that the user types engaging with your work the most might not be who you expect. Whether users are originating from unexpected channels, or skipping sections of your web pages, one snapshot on Crazy Egg can show you that your website audiences might be worth discussing or reevaluating.
Is your website navigation working for users?
On-page analytics can bring to light a lot of interesting learnings into how users are navigating through your web page. Which links to other pages and information are users utilizing, and which are they ignoring? I have seen analytics on a single website page convince an organization to completely rethink their website’s main navigation system. The easier it is for people to navigate to your most valuable pages, the more likely people will make it there and complete your goals for them.
What are your website goals? Is your website meeting these goals?
This is a bit obvious, but looking at on-page analytics allows us to return to discussing the overall goals of each of your web pages and your website as a whole. Is your goal to increase donation conversion? To publish your research widely? To create public awareness about an issue? Your users’ experience on your website will determine whether you’re meeting these goals.
Conclusion
To answer any questions we have about our website, or even know which questions to ask in the first place, we need to start with data. Crazy Egg and other website visitor behavior software tools make this extremely accessible for a nonprofit of any size. With analytics that go deeper than the surface level, we can now understand even more intimately how what we’re presenting to the world is being engaged with, and by whom.
The beauty of working in the nonprofit space is that your role as an organization with a website is one of a connector. You connect members and donors with a cause they care about. You connect your audiences with information. You connect valuable resources to the issues you care about. Your nonprofit website is the epicenter of that ecosystem and for all of those connections. To make sure that every stakeholder you interact with can swiftly, painlessly access whatever they’re coming to you for, we have to make our websites friendly to their needs—and adapt them whenever we find pain points.
So, if your website is your nonprofit’s home base, tracking your user experience and on-page analytics will play a critical role in making that home as friendly, comprehensible, and inviting as possible.
The human brain is hardwired to prefer narrative stories over logic—it’s fiction over facts up there. From The Hunger Games to Harry Potter, the hero’s journey is a tried and true formula for telling compelling stories. If you’re not familiar with it, the formula goes: A hero leaves their ordinary life to pursue an adventure. Along the way, they find a guide. Trials and tests ensue, and eventually after overcoming obstacles, they work their way back to their ordinary life. Cue the triumphant homecoming.
So what if we applied that framework to organizations instead of fiction stories?
Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework does just that. StoryBrand is a popular messaging tool that helps companies and organizations consider their message through the lens of the hero’s journey framework to make marketing resemble our favorite stories. I want to take framework one step further: What does StoryBrand framing for nonprofits look like?
When you think about your nonprofit through the lens of the StoryBrand framework, you’ll open your organization up to invaluable insights on everything from messaging to audience needs and content development. There are two options nonprofits can pursue when they consider their StoryBrand framing.
Option 1: The mission-based method is a fairly common nonprofit framing that puts an organization at the center, framing the nonprofit as the hero. The donors, in this case, are guides called to action through advocacy or donations.
Example framing: A food aid organization is the hero, and the nonprofit’s donors are guides that help the hero address hunger.
Option 2: The engagement-driven method puts a nonprofit’s audience at the center of the story, framing them as the hero. This method is a bit newer in the nonprofit space, and if implemented correctly, it can invite deeper interest, engagement, and action-oriented results from your audience or members.
Example framing: The donors of a food aid organization are the hero, helping to solve hunger and they’re aided by the nonprofit along the way.
There’s no right or wrong way to frame your nonprofit’s story, but in this article, we’re going to explore Option 2. It’s a little more novel, but it invites a lot of engagement, meaningful interactions, and fulfilling experiences for your audience.
Seven Steps to Practice StoryBrand Framing for Nonprofits
Step 1: Who’s the hero of your nonprofit story?
The heart of and the first step in the StoryBrand framework involves understanding your nonprofit’s audience and their current involvement in your work. In other words, does your audience primarily engage through donations, membership, advocacy, or something else?
To deepen engagement and understanding, it’s important to continue seeing your audience as more than just donors. They can be supporters, advocates, partners, stakeholders, external organizations. No matter your issue area or their unique role—your audience is on the front lines of your organization’s cause, driving solutions with you.
By clarifying your audience’s role, you’re taking the first step toward positioning them as the hero and driver in the narrative. You also tee up your organization as the catalyst and guide in the story. And when your audience is framed as the hero of a story, they can feel deeply involved and embedded in your work. You’re strengthening their sense of connection to their own goals and values. This way, it’s not “our organization’s story,” rather it’s “our (the organization + the audience’s) story.”
You work through things together, you’re partners. In creating a partnership mindset with your audience, you can better serve their needs, bolster their engagement, and strengthen your work toward your mission.
In practice: A practical way to implement this first step is to conduct a brand strategy workshop with your team to define your mission and your audience.
Step 2: What does your audience want?
Next, you’ll need to understand what your audience is looking for—what do they really want from their involvement with your organization? This means it’s time to tap into their needs, their motivations, and their challenges.
When you define what your audience wants, you should look at some basic human needs: the needs for connection, community, resource sharing, self-actualization, safety, or relationships. Why are people involved in your nonprofit? Is it because of the tight-knit member community you’ve established? Maybe because you’re addressing a cause they feel threatens their safety, like climate change. Or, if they’re more removed from your issue area—say they’re donating to a school overseas—their involvement might speak to their sense of self.
Good stories revolve around a central tension: will the hero get what they want? When you’re building your nonprofit’s brand story, you need to understand why your members come to your organization. Giving them what they want is the foot in the door—it’s the foundation for addressing the problems you both want to solve together.
In this step, you should also consider the ways in which their intrinsic needs may align with your organization’s goals. If there’s a gap, how do you bridge that through your partnership to ensure that your audience continues to flourish. Don’t forget to look inward, too: Why are you a part of your organization? What brought you to work there? You’ll likely share some of those basic human needs—community, action, or self-actualization—with your audience.
Step 3: What is the problem your audience faces?
When you’re defining your audience’s problem in the StoryBrand framework, you should make sure that the problem is specific, singular, relatable, and concrete. A feeling won’t suffice, and a large, nebulous issue won’t quite work either. For example, saying that your audience’s problem is that they are upset about climate change isn’t quite specific enough. Instead, a more specific problem could be that your audience opposes new fracking plans in your state.
And in the StoryBrand framework, the problems facing your audience should have three levels: internal, external, and philosophical. Let’s look at those with that fracking example in mind.
External Element: These are the real world, concrete elements of a problem. So, for example, the audience doesn’t want water pollution, habitat destruction, or any of the many other consequences that coincide with fracking. I don’t want fracking in my backyard.
Internal Element: The internal level addresses a person’s sense of self and their role in solving the problem. How do I make a difference? Can I actually stop the fracking and improve our situation?
Philosophical Element: This level invokes the overarching good vs. evil divide. Does the problem address a societal wrong or injustice that’s worth righting? I should have a say in my community’s development.
Once you’ve defined your audience’s problem with these elements in mind, you can start to understand how you’ll solve it together.
In practice: Try designing an audience or user journey workshop to better understand your audience’s point of view.
Step 4: Who is the guide?
This is where your organization enters the story. You’re the guide that aids your audience on their hero’s journey. This is your nonprofit’s time to shine by demonstrating your mission, work, impact, goals, and achievements.
In the StoryBrand framework, a hero’s guide should possess two core characteristics: empathy and authority. Lucky for you, nonprofits often have an excess of both! Now, we just have to make sure that we’re adequately sharing that side of our nonprofit brands.
Empathy is likely an integral piece of your nonprofit organization. Your organization harbors a deep understanding of the stakes of your issue area as well as a desire to help.
Authority comes from your nonprofit’s competence and history. How much have you done in the past to address this issue and how well do you understand the problem at hand? Have you helped other heroes (audience members) down the journey of solving this problem before?
In the nonprofit space, that means communicating to your audience exactly how members are treated and how those relationships are cultivated, what you’ve done in the past for your cause, what channels your audience has to communicate with you. And as you do this, put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What would you see, think, and feel about your nonprofit brand after receiving a fundraising email or newsletter?
Once you better understand your audience’s journey, and the lens through which they view your brand, you can better position your organization as their supporter. Your nonprofit can and should be the guide in their journey to meet their desires and address their problems.
In practice: Defining the “guide” in this framework could require a revision of your mission or vision, auditing your organizational development and social impact goals, developing a new strategic plan, or resetting communications goals and standards.
Work to paint a picture of a brand that will guide your audience with empathy and competence in order to meet their needs and achieve success addressing the problems you both want to solve. Be clear about how you can execute these goals—whether that be through research, lobbying, advocacy, or enrichment—and show that you’re the right organization to partner with to solve your audience’s problems.
Step 5: What is your organization’s plan?
Now that you have a concrete idea of your mission and goals, it’s time to highlight the necessary steps on your hero’s journey. Your audience will be looking to you to guide and educate them on what their involvement looks like and how that coincides with your organizational processes.
Start by articulating the terms of engagement for your audience’s relationship to your nonprofit. That means, you should demonstrate things like: where your audience’s donation goes (is it more overhead or more cause-oriented), how they can take direct action (volunteering or petitioning), how their engagement and your guidance breeds change, and how they can measure or track that change.
The next piece of your organization’s guiding plan is to define your organizational processes—outline what you can 100% guarantee to your audience. This is of course easier in the for-profit space, where you actually can make a 100% guarantee that your customer will receive an order they placed. For nonprofits, your guarantees should communicate the promises you make to your stakeholders and how you plan on delivering on those promises.
Think about what you can actually promise your audience. Will you send regular newsletters or updates? Will you promise to continue to lobby on a certain issue? Will you commit to providing funding for constituents? Above all, you should make and commit to honesty, transparency, and ethics every step of the way.
And this part is exciting. You build on the foundational work you’ve done so far to define your audience and your organization, you weave together their engagement steps and your promise, and in doing so, you create your theory of change. Your nonprofit theory of change lives at the heart of your nonprofit’s story: What steps will you help your audience make, and how will those actually make a difference?
In practice: When you’re working this out with your team, don’t be afraid to get granular. You can always scale back for your public messaging.
And by defining your process, your audience will gain a better understanding as to the ways you’re thinking about putting these methods into action to make the impact they’re seeking, as well. This not only clarifies your own internal operations, but it allows for building a network of trust with your audiences, partners, stakeholders, and more.
Step 6: What is the call-to-action for your audience?
Next, you’ll want to consider how you’re calling your audience—your heroes—to action. This can be done in one of two ways: directly or transitionally.
Direct calls-to-action are what we typically think of in asking for donations, offering an option to volunteer or fundraise, or providing a contact form. This is the ideal action you’re calling them to take after they’ve understood your work, processes, and how all of it ties into their own goals.
And the beauty of the StoryBrand framework for nonprofits is that, by the time you’re calling your audience to action, they’ll already understand their role, your role, how you’ll help them meet their needs and solve their problems, and the steps you’ll take together. It’s so much easier to sign onto something when you have this background and context.
Still, a newer audience member might not be ready to dive into action—and that’s okay, too! That’s where the transactional calls-to-action come in. These can take the form of additional resources, informational blogs, industry-based webinars, downloadable content, community hubs, and more. Essentially, you’re providing more ways for your audience to be involved with your organization without requiring a large time or financial commitment. It’s a dip in the water, not a full cannonball.
This stepping stone also builds trust, it lets you re-emphasize both your empathy and your authority as a worthy guide.
In Practice: Consider the ways in which you’re communicating with your audience and how you’re calling them to action at present. Make sure that your direct calls-to-action are direct and simple. Ask questions like: Is a donate or get involved button featured prominently on your website? Also, take the time to audit your site through the lens of someone who’s never visited or heard of your nonprofit before.
As for transactional calls-to-action, try tracking conversions on your marketing and communications to see what’s actually working to bring people into your cause and community.
Step 7: Communicate the stakes
A good nonprofit StoryBrand message demonstrates the stakes of your audience’s engagement. What does the world look like when they’re involved? And what does it look like without them?
This can be one of the most poignant parts of your nonprofit story. Think about a nonprofit that provides free textbooks to students from under-resourced communities. With your hero’s engagement, these students have access to a critical tool they need for their education. Without your hero, the story looks a little different. It’s a fine line, though. We need to communicate the stakes without fear-mongering. Your hero can make a tangible difference for your cause, but they shouldn’t be made to feel like the whole world is on their shoulders, and without their engagement, it’ll all come crashing down. Don’t be scared to communicate real problems, but don’t forget to live in the solutions.
Your hero should understand that their engagement is important and their involvement is invaluable for addressing your shared problems.
In Practice: FrameWorks institute has some excellent resources on how to effectively communicate the stakes, solutions, and potential success for your nonprofit audience.
Take the time to audit your messaging, your mission, and theory of change to make sure that the stakes are adequately addressed without fear-mongering.
Step 8: What does success look like?
At the end of all of this, your audience should feel empowered to take the next step—either directly or transactionally. And once they’re ready, it’s incumbent on you, their guide, to show them what success looks like. Think back to their wants and the problem they hope to solve.
Does their engagement meet their need for connection, community, resource sharing, self-actualization, safety, or relationships?
Also, does your journey together address their problem? Did you win a huge legislative victory or stop fracking in their community? If so, paint that picture for them.
Before anyone embarks on a journey with you, they’ll need to see how great your partnership can be—all the good you can build together. At the end of your hero’s journey, your audience should feel strongly connected and engaged with your work. And they should also feel unique in what they can bring to the table, because your work and your cause truly depend on their engagement.
In practice: Showing success can take many forms, from annual reports to audience audits, your organization should take the time to objectively review how you’re communicating your victories and success to your audience. And don’t forget to consider that from the perspective of placing your audience at the center of the action.
Key Takeaways
There’s a reason why marketers love the power of storytelling: the human brain is hardwired to prefer stories. This powerful StoryBrand framework for nonprofits will help you make your message easier to understand and remember, so your audience pays attention. A compelling story has the power to attract the right audiences to your organization, engage and hold their attention, and persuade them that you are the guide to help solve their problems.
“Engagement-Driven” StoryBrand framing centers your audience at the heart of your nonprofit, drives alignment, and engages your community. By following this framework, you’ll better understand your audience and they’ll better understand you! Together, you’ll have the potential to start movements, build community, and move mountains thanks to the clear, compelling story you’ve braided together.
Visual storytelling holds the unique power to transcend borders and language barriers to build movements, empathy, brands, and beliefs. From cave drawings to comic books, we’re wired to gravitate toward visual stories—our brains even process images 60,000 times faster than text. And for a nonprofit brand, ethical visual storytelling can be one of your best tools for sharing your mission and promoting action.
Visual storytelling is more than a tool, though.Whether you’re looking at an eye-popping logo or website,visual stories are a vehicle for communicating values, evoking emotions, and communicating cultures.
With so much to gain, it’s important to remember that visual storytelling isn’t passive. It shapes perspectives and cultural conversations. That’s why we have to take time to think critically about how we tell visual stories with the organizations and brands we oversee. There’s no onesingle right way to tell a story. There are, however, ethical and unethical ways to tell a visual story.
When you practice ethical visual storytelling with your nonprofit brand, you make the space for your organization to be authentic to your mission, audience, values. If your nonprofit brand produces ethical visual stories instead of perpetuating stereotypes or biases, you get to set the tone for how you show up in the world. Consequently, you set yourself up for greater impact because people trust authentic organizations. And your cause—whether its climate, clinical, or child welfare—depends on that trust.
The ethics of visual storytelling, like all storytelling, change over time. And as storytellers, it’s our responsibility to make sure that we root our stories in our community’s values. We can start by taking what’s called a “values-based approach,” and define our brand’s values. Respect, empathy, collaboration, transparency, equity, and inclusion are all great values to help ground into your brand’s story.
From there, you can consider your nonprofit brand’s visual storytelling—which is the best vehicle a brand has for showcasing its values in a clear, direct, forward-looking way. If you tell an ethical visual story with your brand, platform, or organization, you’re well on your way to building a brand that’s engaging, respected, accessible, and authentic. And that journey starts when you ask yourself seven questions.
Seven Questions to Start Your Nonprofit Brand’s Ethical Visual Storytelling Journey
1. Is my brand story authentic?
An authentic brand doesn’t conflict with its established identity. Take Dove for example. Dove is a brand that built its modern reputation on celebrating every woman’s body. With campaigns like Real Beauty, which celebrates the diversity of people’s body types, the brand carved out an important role for itself in the budding self-love and acceptance movements of the 2010s.
Then, in 2017, Dove released an ad that suggested a black woman, after using Dove soap, transformed into a white woman. Sure, it was not the intention of the ad, but through ill-planned visual storytelling, the ad received near-instant backlash. Dove unintentionally contradicted their brand values by releasing an ad that undermined its role as a champion of diversity.
If you instead stay true to your brand’s values, you can build an authentic brand. That starts with considering the values and design principles that define your nonprofit brand. Brands need clear, unambiguous values that express what they stand for and why—and those have to be consistent with your visual storytelling. Don’t be scared to evolve and grow, but make sure that your brand’s evolution is rooted in your established values. That way, your brand’s evolution will feel authentic.
2. Is my brandstory respectful?
When you’re building up a respected, trustworthy brand—especially a nonprofit brand—you need to make sure that the visual story you’re telling remains respectful, even if the content is humorous. That means you need to consider the dignity and worth of all stakeholders involved, from your audience to your directors.
Ethical visual storytelling should avoid portraying any group or individual in a way that is demeaning, disrespectful, or dehumanizing. Vulnerability Framing—defining people by their vulnerabilities—perpetuates stereotypes or weaknesses. To practice ethical visual storytelling, we have to consider whether our imagery will be divisive, demoralizing, or offensive to any individual or community. In practice, that looks like showing people at their most tenacious and resilient—not at rock bottom.
And to make sure you’re building a respectful brand, you should also consider different lived experiences. Take the time to incorporate diverse perspectives and voices to ensure that your visuals are respectful and pay people the dignity they’re owed rather than perpetuate division or biases.
In branding, you often get what you give: Respected brands are founded on respectful practices. Our visual storytelling in the nonprofit space should bring people together—rally people around a common goal of advancing social change. When you tell a respectful visual story, you can do just that. We’ve seen the power of respectful visual stories improve lives all around us, with effective, respectful visual stories helping to switch the script on serious illness messaging or even change the way we frame stories for greater impact. Just by taking the time to read this article, you’re already on your way to building a thoughtful, respectful brand.
The FrameWorks Institute provides research on effective story framing, and our design work with the organization builds on their effective framing practices.
3. Is my brand story true?
There’s no room for fake news when you’re building a brand’s visual story. A brand built on falsehoods is a house of cards. An ethical visual brand story maintains storytelling integrity.
Take a brand built on addressing food insecurity. Imagine they use imagery that emphasizes thinness or shows empty plates and fridges. These images would narrowly depict food insecurity, plus they would be untrue to the different ways food insecurity can manifest. Food insecurity means more than having little access to food. Food insecurity also means that people may only have access to low-nutrient, ultra-processed foods. Now, someone facing that kind of food insecurity might not be underweight or have empty plates. Where an emotionally-charged visual might reap incredible engagement for a nonprofit brand, it can be untrue to your most important stakeholders.
Brand visual storytelling should be truthful and accurate. That means you have to ensure that your visuals don’t misrepresent or distort facts, context, or situations. Avoid using visual effects or manipulations that could mislead or deceive your audience. A strong brand can stand alone on truthful, accurate, respectful imagery.
4. Is my brand story relevant?
This key question ties into a brand’s authenticity. Your nonprofit brand’s visual story needs to play a role in the current cultural conversation—that means taking an active, not passive, role in producing ethical, meaningful stories that build empathy. And in the nonprofit space, where so much brand power relies on public perception, you can’t be the brand you were 30 years ago. Think about how much has changed since 1993—now imagine still following all the brands and using all the products you used then. Now, imagine following them if they hadn’t evolved at all in the past 30 years!
You don’t necessarily have to subscribe to the most cutting-edge or disruptive parts of our culture. But nonprofit brands should carve out the time to consider whether or not the stories they tell reflect their contemporary role in society. Take American Forests, for example. While many organizations in the environmental space have garnered a reputation for lacking diversity or equity commitments, American Forests had different plans. That’s why we worked with the 150-year-old organization to make sure that their website met the moment. Centering their new, bold DEI and environmental equity goals on their new website demonstrated the nonprofit’s commitment to a new era of environmental equity—and cultural relevance.
Constructive partnered with American Forests to revitalize their website and carry the organization into the future.
Relevant visual storytelling can mean a lot of things—a rebrand, a website rebuild, a new campaign. But if you’re telling an ethical visual nonprofit story, that means you should always take the audience’s background, values, and beliefs, as well as the cultural and social context of the story you are telling into consideration. You should also make sure your visuals are appropriate and not triggering or traumatizing to some individuals.
5. Am I perpetuating harmful archetypes or stereotypes?
Archetypes provide guidelines for characterization—you might be familiar with archetypes like the rebel, the villain, or the hero in stories. And archetypes exist for a reason. They can help us understand our nonprofit brands in the context of our audience.
Stereotypes, on the other hand, are oversimplified, often derogatory classifications of people or groups. Although archetypes can sometimes be helpful, you need to be careful with both archetypes and stereotypes in your nonprofit brand visual storytelling. Visual storytelling can—often unconsciously—perpetuate harmful stereotypes or biases. It’s important to critically examine your visuals to ensure that you are not perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Make sure you’re not perpetuating overused archetypes or harmful stereotypes in terms of age, race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, or religion.
When I think about my own role in avoiding visual tropes or clichés that reinforce negative stereotypes, I think about my work with the Serious Illness Messaging Toolkit. Here, where we had the ability to go with the tried-and-true hospice imagery—cupped hands, doves, bed-ridden patients—we took a different route. End-of-life or serious illness care doesn’t have one face. So we visually demonstrated the diversity of ability and utilized fictional, fantastical people with purple skin to increase relatability, reduce isolation, and break the trend of visual stereotypes for people with serious illnesses.
6. Is my story culturally aware?
Visual storytelling should be culturally sensitive and respectful of diverse lived experiences. In the nonprofit space, this is an especially critical question to consider. Are you avoiding cultural appropriation or stereotyping? And are you taking care to represent cultural practices, beliefs, and traditions accurately and respectfully?
Let’s take poverty as an example topic. Around 2016, nonprofits got a lot of backlash for a practice called “poverty porn.” The practice involves using exploitative images of people living in poverty in order to meet the goals (fundraising or other) of the organization sharing the images. It’s also a master class in what not to do. Poverty porn misrepresents poverty, it rarely features consenting subjects, it often perpetuates stereotypes, and it fuels a cycle of unjust emotional manipulation. It really all boils down to one thing: Poverty porn violates basic human dignity—and dignity is an ethical visual storytelling essential.
Yet, many nonprofits still work with underprivileged or under-resourced communities. So how do we tell those visual stories ethically? For starters, we need to take into consideration the multidimensional nature of the subject at hand. Poverty looks different across cultures. That means that the perceptions of poverty differ, too.
When you’re telling a nonprofit visual brand story, you need to consider the ways your story will play out across audiences. Avoid visual storytelling that could be perceived as insensitive or offensive to certain cultures or communities.
7. Is my story optimistic?
Ethical storytelling should be real, but it should also be optimistic. Fatalistic or cynical storytelling doesn’t inspire action. Our partners at the Frameworks Institute recommend a practice called “solutions-oriented framing.” A story should weave in solutions early and often. Visually, that could mean a brand centers desired outcomes rather than current crises. What would inspire you more: an environmental nonprofit with a logo of the Earth on fire, or one with a brand that communicates the beauty of restoring nature.
Visual storytelling is one of our best tools for getting people to relate to something—to consciously or unconsciously see their perception of themselves reflected in an image. That’s why it’s so important to never lose sight of hope in your nonprofit brand’s visual storytelling.
Otherwise, can you imagine how bad it would feel to see an image that reminds you of yourself, and that image instills hopelessness? You don’t have to be fake. In the nonprofit space, we often depict hard truths. But we can’t lose sight of dignity. Our goal is to change the world for the better, so we can’t lose sight of inspiring that change.
Take Spark the Journey, for example. The nonprofit prides itself on giving young adults the tools, mentorship, and community they need to achieve economic mobility. It centers these young adults and their potential—and the brand imagery captures that potential and optimism through hero imagery. Spark the Journey’s optimistic imagery is a great reminder to consider how your brand’s visuals can inspire hope, motivate action, or promote positive change.
Constructive and Spark the Journey worked together to create a visual photography style that emphasized the potential and tenacity of the young adults involved with the organization.
Closing Thoughts on Ethical Visual Storytelling and Your Nonprofit Brand
The future of nonprofit brand visual storytelling is bright—and with powerful, ethical visual storytelling, we have the opportunity to change behaviors, hearts, and minds in hopes of making a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.
We hope these considerations help you build a brand based on ethical visual storytelling practices. And here at Constructive, building brands that incorporate diverse perspectives and experiences to drive change is kind of our mission. If you’re interested in learning more about building an ethical visual nonprofit brand, get in touch anytime.
Digital transformations and website rebuilds aren’t part of an organization’s day-to-day operations. Still, they likely sit far outside the scope of nonprofits’ everyday work. But that’s okay. There are people who do these projects everyday—and I’m one of them!
Here at Constructive, we’ve seen website rebuilds open up organizations to new regions of the world. We’ve made understanding local air pollution accessible to drive policy changes. We’ve transformed how an organization that aids millions of girls and women interacts with its audience online.
Taking on a website rebuild project or a digital transformation is well worth the time and effort. In my experience as a project manager, I’ve learned some best practices for what it takes for organizations and agencies to glide through these intensive but exciting projects.
One key to success: Assembling a web or digital dream team. To drive a website rebuild or digital transformation, an organization needs to considerately assemble the internal team they want working on the project. That might mean looping people from outside of your immediate team or working outside the box of your own day-to-day operations.
Building the right team for these time- and thought-intensive projects is crucial but do-able, so let’s dive in.
What is a website rebuild or digital transformation?
First, let’s get some definitions cleared up.
A website rebuild is exactly what it sounds like: it’s the process of rebuilding an organization’s website, often but not always from the ground up.
A digital transformation on the other hand is both a website overhaul plus the integration of digital technologies into all aspects of an organization’s operations, processes, and business models.
Both projects tend to drive growth, innovation, and efficiency. They also play a foundational role in carrying your organization’s brand into the future. A new website or digital ecosystem will empower your organization to build on your goals and aspirations, all while expanding your impact.
With so much at stake, you’ll likely need to build a cross-functional team with representatives from different parts of the organization—teams like operations, senior leadership, technology—to ensure that all perspectives are considered. Unfortunately, sometimes teams are built in silos and key decision-makers or perspectives get left behind until it’s too late.
Some Avoidable Mistakes
Missed deadlines, bump ups, extra rounds and revisions, conflicting feedback. “Plan for what is difficult while it is easy,” rings true here. Missteps early on can lead to big hiccups in the later stages of a project.
Let’s talk about some common, avoidable mistakes.
1. Only including your Marketing and Communications team
Usually, digital transformations and website rebuilds are driven by an organization’s communications team. But in these transformational projects, you don’t have to go it alone.
It’s okay to take on new responsibilities that you’re excited about, but it’s important to measure your expectations and realistically assess your experience. For example, if you’re a communications strategist, it might be difficult to learn about back-end web development on top of your other everyday responsibilities. You know your strengths and knowledge gaps, and there’s a pretty good chance you know those of your team, too. So be sure to loop in colleagues who have the necessary background to make a project run smoothly.
Depending on the scope of your team and of the project, it’s extremely beneficial to loop in key members of your organization across different departments and teams, such as technology, operations, executive leadership, and more. Cross-functional teams are a key component of a successful project because they bring together diverse perspectives, facilitate collaboration, promote agility, and prioritize user-centered design.
2. Choosing a point of contact (POC) without decision power or internal leverage.
It’s normal to have a primary POC serve as a coordinator between an agency and an organization. However, if the POC is the only liaison between the agency and the organization, things might get complicated. Here are some scenarios where I’ve seen this dynamic go wrong:
Scenario 1: An agency presents a design to an organization’s POC who then needs to present that design to their internal team.
Where it breaks down: Decision makers or stakeholders can’t directly ask questions to the designers and don’t understand why decisions have been made.
Scenario 2: An organization’s POC lacks the leverage to gather decision makers’ feedback or approval and has to make decisions on their own.
Where it breaks down: A POC might approve something that hasn’t been approved or even seen by key decision makers. Later down the line, the project is stalled to retroactively right a wrong turn.
Solutions: Setting Your Website Rebuild Team up for Success
The problems we went through above are easily avoided. Here’s how you can stop them before they stop you.
1. Personnel mapping
You can start assembling a team by mapping out the personnel you’ll need to loop in for various different parts of the project. For example, if you’re thinking about a new website’s communications emphasis, that will probably involve the head of your communications team. When it comes to digital integrations, it’s probably going to require your technology team.
There are different ways to make these maps, one that we love here at Constructive is the RACI matrix, which stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed.
A key part of personnel mapping includes determining more than someone’s job title, but adding different titles that correspond to the project at hand. Who are the decision-makers? Who are the blockers? Who needs to be CC’ed on big decisions? Who outside of your team needs to be involved and when?
Mapping out your organization’s personnel will help you assemble the best team possible to keep your project on track.
2. Identify subject matter experts
Remember that problem of wearing too many (and maybe even some strange) hats during a project? Well we have a solution and it starts with the best policy: honesty.
Be honest with yourself about the expertise of colleagues within your organization and within your team—and within your own capabilities. Don’t be scared to identify knowledge or experience gaps, you can even consult your agency partner on who within your organization might need to get involved at different points in a project.
While this might be your first or second time doing a project like this, agencies do it every day. They want you to succeed and they’ll work with you to make sure that you have the experts you need looped in to drive your project forward.
Subject experts are just that—experts. This project is bigger than you and probably bigger than your team alone. Don’t be afraid to pull in people outside of your communications team to maintain smooth sailing.
3. Determine capacity for regular check-ins
Once you’ve identified who you’ll loop into your project, the next step is to determine everyone’s capacity. You likely only know the bandwidth of your own team, so it doesn’t hurt to take time at the start of a project and figure out different teams’ busy seasons.
Let’s say you’ll only need to loop in your technology team during the second half of a project, but their participation will be absolutely critical. It’s worth communicating with them on the front end to make sure they can join for regular check-ins during that point of a project. And if you give everyone enough time to plan around their upcoming responsibilities, you’ll save yourself the headache of urgent status updates, absent decision-makers, or deadline delays.
Building Your Roster
The problems and solutions above are team building 101. They can take your colleagues from out-of-steam to dream team, and especially if you’re working within a very large organization, I have an example roster you can use as a guide.
Here are some of the key players you should determine, define, and include on your project:
Project Manager/POC: Your project manager will be responsible for planning, executing, and monitoring the transformation project alongside the project manager of your agency partner. This person should coordinate the activities of the project team, keep everyone informed, and manage expectations. When you’re slotting someone into this role, you should carefully consider the level of decision-making power they hold.
Executive Sponsor: An executive sponsor is a senior-level leader who has the authority and influence to drive the transformation forward. The executive sponsor provides strategic direction, secures necessary resources, and helps to overcome organizational resistance. They also have the ability to block the project or give critical green lights. And this person doesn’t necessarily have to be…a person. This role could also be fulfilled by a group of people or a board. And while the executive sponsor might not be in on every meeting with the agency, that’s where the POC can swoop in to present and liaison between the two.
Technical Lead: A technical lead takes care of the technical aspects of the transformation, such as selecting and implementing technology platforms, managing data migration, and ensuring system integration. Think about the subject area expertise when you’re slotting this role.
Business Analyst: A business analyst takes responsibility for understanding the organization’s business processes, identifying areas for improvement, and helping to design new processes that align with the transformation goals. They’ll play a big part in ensuring that your transformation advances your organization’s engagement and impact goals.
Change Management Lead: A change management lead is responsible for managing the human side of the transformation, including identifying potential resistance to change, developing communication and training plans, and ensuring that employees are engaged and motivated throughout the process. One framework that we like here at Constructive is the Managing Complex Change model.
Subject Matter Experts: Subject matter experts provide deep knowledge and expertise in specific areas that are impacted by the transformation. They likely come from different backgrounds and teams, such as marketing, finance, operations, or technology—but they’ll all bring great perspectives and value to your project.
Ready, set, plan!
So, now you’ve got the tools to assemble an amazing team, who will you call up?
And no matter who you bring into play, don’t forget that communication is key every step of the way. Building a strong team is the first step—next up is building a strong plan to keep every one of your players on track.
I’ve seen projects crumble under the pressures brought on by narrow teams, unrealistic expectations, and expertise mismatches. Even if you’re not an expert in engineering or digital integrations, you can be an expert team builder and drive the smoothest, most transformative web or digital project to make sure your organization can have an even stronger impact.
Thank you for taking the time to read me and please reach out if you have any questions!
For a growing number of nonprofits, websites represent your main point of contact with the communities you serve. Whether you’re a membership organization, a nonprofit with an e-commerce arm, an online research publisher, or a think tank, your site is vital. It determines how people see you, understand you, and interact with you. Websites are the epicenter of our digital ecosystems, which means their health needs to take priority. To maintain a happy, healthy website, you have to start with tracking and analyzing your nonprofit’s website data—which means, you’ll likely need to set up or improve your nonprofit’s Google Analytics (GA) account.
GA will store and analyze your nonprofit’s website data. It shows you whether anybody read the article you published, filled out your contact form, or hit your donation button. It’s considered the gold standard for its features, integrations, and price (a standard account is free). And if you don’t use GA or any tracking software yet, that’s okay. The barrier to entry can seem high, but it’s not insurmountable!
With an overwhelming amount of settings to configure, dimensions and metrics to report on, and personalization options to choose from, it can be difficult to know where to start with your nonprofit’s GA account.
Even for those of us who have experience utilizing Google’s Universal Analytics software, we aren’t exactly experts anymore either. Universal Analytics is now Google Analytics 4 (GA4), a new and pretty different version of the original GA.
So why should you crawl over this knowledge barrier and start taking your GA account more seriously? Well, building out your nonprofit’s GA4 has clear benefits. With GA4, you can:
Better manage your website and marketing publishing strategies
Understand your current website traffic and website users
Set web goals and focus organizational resources
Increase web conversion rates
Make data-driven web optimization decisions
In short: GA4 helps you measure and understand whether your current website and publishing activities are actually helping you hit your conversion goals.
Without GA4, we don’t know what we don’t know. With GA4, we can optimize nonprofit websites. GA4 lets us make data-driven decisions to increase KPIs like organic search traffic, pageviews, form submissions, donation conversion rates–you name it, GA4 can track it.
Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring the wide world of GA4 features and opportunities. I’ve played around with our own website’s GA4 property, completed the LinkedIn Learning module on the topic, and earned my GA4 certification from Google. And I’ll be honest: Setting up your GA4 will certainly take a bit of learning and some trial and error, but there are some very do-able, practical tips to help you get started. Let’s dive into the most useful features and actions for achieving GA4-informed website success. Whatever success means for your specific organization!
How to Set Up Your Organization’s GA4
First, migrate your current property to GA4 and pull relevant historical data from Universal Analytics. Or make an account
Google has announced that beginning in July of 2023, their Universal Analytics version of GA will stop processing data. That means all organizations will need to migrate their property(ies) over to GA4 or risk losing their historical data.
Thankfully, Google has made this an easy lift. Essentially you just have to click on the GA4 Setup Assistant within your Admin area and it will bring your existing basic settings over to GA4. You may need to also install a new tag(s) on your site depending on your current tagging system. Other than not being able to migrate over more advanced settings, there is one other large hangup with moving to a GA4 property: historical data.
GA4’s data collection process and schema are very different from Universal Analytics’. Historic data cannot come along with us on the ride to our new property. Before your historical data access on Universal Analytics is removed, you should export the most important reports and data points from your historical data or consider transferring all of your data over to a platform like Google BigQuery.
And for those of you starting a GA4 account the setup process from scratch, the process is much the same. Simply follow the GA4 Account Setup prompts and utilize the Setup Assistant.
Check your data streams and settings in GA4
With properly configured data streams and settings, you can begin to analyze the data flowing into your GA4 account with confidence in its accuracy. On your new or existing GA4 property, underneath Admin and Data Streams, you can check that your website and apps are all actively importing data into your correct GA4 account and property(ies). You can also check that you’ve properly configured your property settings including your property’s name, the account it lives within, and your timezone and currency. Then, follow any necessary prompts in the Setup Assistant.
We also recommend enabling a new feature of GA4 called “Enhanced Measurement.” This feature lets GA4 automatically measure event interactions such as pageviews, scrolls, outbound link clicks, form downloads, and more on your website pages. Enhanced Measurement is one of GA4’s main selling points. It makes data analysis on these types of user interaction events much easier than similar analyses in Universal Analytics. That means GA4 can also play a pivotal role in easily tracking your organization’s specific conversion goals, which we’ll cover next.
Also, take this opportunity to check that you’re funneling data from your marketing, social, and email campaigns to your GA4 account. If you use MailChimp or any other marketing CRM, you should integrate GA4 under GA4’s integrations tab and also enable tracking for each campaign you send out. Under “Product Links” in GA4, you can also correctly track your paid web advertisements through Google Ads Linking.
Add conversion goals
Also in your GA4 Admin settings, you’ll find a tab titled “Conversions.” Conversion goals on GA4 allow you to set specific tracked “events” as conversions for your website. You can track whether your website users are completing the actions you want them to. Conversions should represent the most important events that can take place on your website, and we recommend setting between 3-5 to start.
Conversions will vary largely based on your organizational mission and goals as well as your website and app goals. For instance, consider a think tank. A conversion for this organization might be pageviews and engagements on their new research pages or downloads for their digital resources (these are both considered soft conversions). For nonprofits with an e-commerce website, donations and product purchases might be their most important conversions (two examples of hard conversions). For membership organizations, membership sign-ups and renewals are two (hard) conversion options. For any organization with contact forms, these may be conversions, too.
By now you can see that the list of events that can represent conversions are endless. This also means that the process of setting conversions isn’t standardized. You may need to use advanced settings and Google Tag Manager, which you can learn more about with Google’s Support here.
Add monetization if relevant
If your organization has an e-commerce website section, you can track more than conversion goals. You can also set up the monetization section of GA4 Admin settings to track revenue and transactions. This section gives detailed insight into users’ purchasing behaviors, which help inform and improve customer acquisition and retention.
Add audiences if relevant
GA4 also allows you to set specific audiences in Admin settings to collect audience specific events, dimensions, and metrics. This feature is especially useful for e-commerce and membership organizations. E-commerce organizations can now segment out non-purchasers and purchasers to better understand user behavior and market to the groups differently. For membership organizations, you can segment audiences into member and non-member groups. Also for organizations with multilingual websites, you can group users based on their site language preference.
One drawback: The audience feature’s ability to segment users is of course limited to the dimensions, metrics, and events that can be tracked to GA4. We cannot segment users based on information that may be meaningful to us but impossible to collect. For instance, a research institute’s two main audiences might be journalists and policymakers, but this does not mean we can create GA4 audiences for each of these professions. This being said, for behavior based segmentation, or segmentation for the various user data we do have access to (geographic location, age, gender, language, etc.) this feature can be very useful.
GA4 Maintenance and Reporting Best Practices for Your Organization
Track marketing campaigns to better understand their effectiveness
With GA4, you can more accurately track and understand your marketing campaigns across channels, while also monitoring their contributions to web traffic and conversions.
One way to campaign track in GA4 is to use the Google URL builder. The builder lets you give unique URLs for every campaign based on the campaign’s source (where the traffic came from ex. Facebook) and medium (the path from the source to your site ex. social). Clearly name and use new URLs for each campaign. Then, by choosing the session campaign dimension for analysis, you can view the campaigns’ effectiveness (associated web sessions, user numbers, event engagements) across the Acquisition reports in GA4.
Consider a climate organization preparing to send out an Earth Day marketing campaign. The goal: increasing website visits and donations. Using the URL builder they can then track website visitors from their Earth Day communications in GA4 across sources (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc.) and mediums (organic, cost-per-click, email etc.). This allows them to understand the effectiveness of their overall marketing campaign. It also shows which communication channels offer the highest value to them.
Use clear titles for pages and campaigns without repeating names
Using clear naming conventions across your website and marketing campaigns is also key to bringing useful data into your GA4 account. If multiple pages or campaigns share the same name, it will become very difficult to differentiate them. And it will become nearly impossible to attribute users and pageviews to the right page or campaign. Nondescript titles can also cause confusion about the source of data (for example: did you publish content on Instagram or LinkedIn?). This makes your job of tracking data more difficult and time consuming. Creating naming conventions across web development and marketing activities ensures consistency and saves you time.
Document major publishing and marketing launch dates to make the most of your data
Currently GA4 does not have the same notation capabilities as Universal Analytics did. You used to be able to add dates of relevant publishing and launch dates to timelines (and there has been much speculation about whether this feature will eventually return to GA4). For the time being, it’s still important to note down in an editorial calendar or document when campaigns launch. That way, when you return to analyze data, you can make sense of large spikes in traffic and user growth.
Make use of GA’s extensive personalization features and explore tab
GA4 has completely streamlined the report experience, replacing many pre-made reports in Universal Analytics with the “Explore Tab.” This allows admins to create countless personalized reports. You can look at any dimensions and metrics you want with various analysis techniques, such as funnel exploration, path exploration, segment overlap, and more.
Another personalization option in GA4 is the personalized report snapshot dashboard. The snapshot includes 16 cards that show your organization’s key metrics ([insert examples]). It also gives you the option to personalize your overview reports for acquisition, engagement, monetization, and more. A fully personalized GA4 makes reporting on your organization’s most important metrics quick and easy.
Check and report on GA data regularly
An obvious best practice that’s worth mentioning is checking and reporting your GA4 data on a regular basis. Reporting on data quarterly allows your organization to check in at each quarter-close. You can see whether you’re meeting your web conversion and traffic goals. And GA4 lets you investigate any major events or trends. Setting annual and quarterly goals for your website can better direct focus and resources, and give you the necessary benchmarks for success.
Use insights to optimize your web presence
Reported data is good. Actionable data is great. The insights you stand to gain from properly setting up your organization’s GA4 can help you optimize your website experience for user engagement, organic search traffic, and anything that represents website conversion for you.
Let’s say that pageviews and organic search traffic on a high-value piece of content are low. To change that, you can go in and change some of the metadata, the content, or the title. If GA4 is showing you that conversions spiked on a day that you sent out an email campaign, you can create campaigns with similar messaging in the future. If it seems your social media strategy is not bringing many users over to your website, you can reevaluate. GA gives you the tools to make informed changes.
While the world of GA remains large, new, and evolving, these first steps are a great place to start. Like most software and web development tools, GA4 becomes a little more intuitive and a little less technical with every update. With a little bit of learning and a lot of experimenting, anybody can configure a GA4 account to begin regularly reporting and integrating GA4 data into their web publishing process. Your website, community, and conversion rates will thank you for it!
When an environmental nonprofit and an agency embark on a rebrand or website redesign, they’re not just tweaking a logo or switching CMS platforms—they’re building an engine for change, one that will serve generations to come.
Since 2005, nonprofits dedicated to advancing climate and environmental solutions have turned to Constructive to help them educate, engage, and activate audiences. We’ve been privileged to learn from some of the most innovative thinkers and leaders on the front lines of the climate crisis.
Constructive has proudly stood beside partners whose research and solutions transcend issue areas—from pioneers in the climate communications and journalism space to ground-breaking environmental researchers and conservationists—we’ve learned how to mold research into inspiring branding and communications. With a focus on research, data, policy and advocacy, we’ve helped cultivate movement-building brands to advance systemic climate solutions.
The way we communicate about our environment has existential consequences. And no matter their issue area or constituency, the environmental organizations we partner with share a powerful vision for our future with the team at Constructive: We all want to safeguard a livable future for generations to come.
Timeline: A History of Designing with Earth in Mind
2005: Securing America’s Future Energy
Securing America’s Energy Future (SAFE) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing oil-dependency in the United States. SAFE advances secure, resilient, and sustainable transportation and energy solutions by shaping policies, perceptions, and practices. Back in 2005, Constructive helped launch SAFE’s brand. Together, we created the organization’s visual identity, logo and website, as well as policy reports, event communications, and a wide range of signature policy reports that addressed the national security and environmental complications of the nation’s oil importation practices.
With SAFE, we also produced Oil Shockwave, the first-ever oil crisis simulation. To create Oil Shockwave, we worked in collaboration with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and later repurposed the simulation for classroom use at the Harvard Kennedy School.
2007: Electrification Coalition
The Electrification Coalition (EC) has its sights set on advancing the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. Through strategic policy, advocacy campaigns, consumer education, and fleet electrification, the organization has played a critical role in developing the electric vehicle supply chain across the United States. When the organization launched in 2007, it turned to Constructive to help bring its brand to life. Together, we developed the organization’s flagship branding and website and published several landmark policy reports and business cases to accelerate the electrification of the United States’ transportation grid and business fleet vehicles.
2011: World Cocoa Foundation
World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) is the world leader in cocoa agriculture and communities, conducting research and operating programs that provide education, business skills, and healthcare to farming communities across four continents. The organization is a model and a leader in sustainable agricultural practices, community development, and a steward of the full value chain of the cocoa industry.
In 2011, WCF partnered with Constructive to rebrand the organization and redesign their website. We also worked with them on the production of their communications, events, reports, and partner materials. In the years that followed, we’ve continued to work with WCF to help the organization advance sustainable agriculture and community development so that cocoa can continue to be sustainably produced.
Learn more about our work with WCF to advance sustainable agriculture and community development.
2012: Institute for Industrial Productivity
The Institute for Industrial Productivity (IIP) works toward a low-carbon future by providing companies and governments across the globe with best practices for low-carbon enterprise and energy efficiency. Constructive and IIP began our partnership in 2012. Together, we developed the organization’s branding and website to speak to the organization’s various stakeholders in the private and public sectors. We also partnered with IIP on multiple data resource projects with an ultimate goal of providing organizations with the resources and information they need to cut carbon emissions.
2013: Acadia Center
“Healthy Climate. Resilient Economy. Equitable Opportunities.” The Acadia Center has a bold vision of reducing carbon emissions in the Northeast by 50% or more by 2030. The organization takes a collaborative approach to advancing clean energy solutions, and in 2013, Acadia Center (formerly known as Environment Northeast) turned to Constructive when it was time for a fresh identity. Together, we renamed the organization, completed a strategic rebrand, and created a website that could carry their new brand into that bold, resilient future. We also designed and launched their signature report EnergyVision 2030.
Sitting at the intersection of government, industry, grassroots organizations, advocates and communities, the Acadia Center brand and website continues to reach audiences across sectors while centering their courageous clean energy goals.
2013: Yale Environmental Performance Index
In 2013, Constructive and the Yale Environmental Performance Index (EPI) partnered together to establish a new standard in environmental data visualization. Tracking data for more than 200 countries’ climate metrics, environmental health, and ecosystem vitality, the EPI is the standard-bearer for measuring international environmental performance.
Looking to leap forward in the EPI’s 15th year, Yale asked Constructive to rethink the organization to make its big-data research more accessible, engaging, and useful to a broader audience. Together, we developed a website that empowers EPI’s audience to deepen their understanding of complex environmental issues and their global implications. Learn more about our work to advance EPI’s brand in their time of transition.
2014: ClimateWorks Foundation
Founded by the Hewlett, Packard, and Oak foundations, ClimateWorks is a global climate philanthropy that develops, implements, and evaluates strategies and investments to reduce emissions in the most carbon-intensive regions and sectors. In 2014, the organization began embarking on a strategic plan revision process. During that time of transition, ClimateWorks turned to Constructive to help the organization translate its ideas into branding and a digital strategy that articulated its bold, new vision to accelerate climate action at scale. We worked closely with all of their stakeholders to develop both a new brand strategy and messaging platform to meet the moment. Learn more about how, together, we refreshed the organization’s brand and designed a website that has continued to carry ClimateWorks—and its ambitious goals—into the future.
2014: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
The Yale Program for Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) is the preeminent authority on the science of climate change awareness and attitudes. The organization provides ground-breaking research and reporting on the psychological, cultural, and political factors that shape public opinion, behavior, and policy.
Looking to strengthen their brand, rethink their publishing strategy, and transform their website, YPCCC partnered with Constructive in 2014 to create a fresh logo for the brand and a website that connects the dots between their brand value and how they deliver it online. Learn more about our work together.
2014: Yale Center for Business & The Environment
Yale University is home to the United States’ oldest joint-degree program in business and the environment. The Yale Center for Business and the Environment fosters the creation of sustainable solutions to contemporary challenges. In 2014, the center asked Constructive to revitalize their website. Together, we designed a website that built on the brand’s unmatched legacy and depth of expertise, while showcasing the center’s multi-faceted research, industry-leading student programs, and innovative solutions.
2015: Yale Climate Connections
Yale Climate Connections is a pioneering force in climate journalism, producing daily public radio programming for more than 200 radio stations, as well as in-depth video and written digital content. After nearly a decade of growth, Climate Connections was saddled with an unmanageable website that hindered their ability to produce research, analysis, or engaging and informative stories. In 2015, the Climate Connections turned to Constructive to redesign their brand and rethink their digital strategy. Together, we developed a visual brand identity to match the premiere brand and designed a website that makes critical climate ideas engaging and comprehensible. Check out our case study on revitalizing Climate Connections.
2016: Climate Impact Lab
The Climate Impact Lab is an unprecedented collaborative of climate scientists, economists, and data engineers from the University of California, Berkeley, The University of Chicago, Rutgers University, and Rhodium Group. To launch the new initiative and support the release of its first major research project, they asked Constructive to develop their brand, website, and a big-data tool that empirically demonstrates precisely how climate change increases global poverty and inequality. See how we built on this impactful brand’s legacy to carry the Climate Impact Lab into the future.
2017: Climate & Land Use Alliance
The Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) is a collaborative of foundations united by a simple but powerful belief: Healthy forests and sustainable land use are two of the most powerful tools in the global response to climate change. Following a strategic plan revision, CLUA asked Constructive to help them communicate their new strategy to a wider audience with greater simplicity and impact. Together, we created a new messaging framework, program communications, and branding. We also reworked the organization’s website to both reflect CLUA’s new outlook and more accurately represent the breadth of their work.
2017: Air Quality Life Index
With frontier research that quantifies the causal relationship between air pollution and reduced life expectancy, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) engaged Constructive to create The Air Quality Life Index, a groundbreaking nonprofit data visualization platform.
Their goals? To make clear that air pollution is the greatest threat to human health, and to provide policymakers, leaders, and the public with the insights and tools needed to shape policies that promote longer, healthier lives while mitigating the impacts of climate change. Together, we built a site that clearly demonstrates the impact of climate change and degraded air quality on public health and life expectancy.
We’re proud of the journey we took to create a website that communicates pollution and connects that to health and wellbeing. Learn more about our work together.
2017: Regulatory Assistance Project
The Regulatory Assistance Project is a global coalition of experts with a common goal of accelerating our transition to a clean, reliable, and efficient energy future. Garnering support from both public and private decision-makers, the organization has a track record of championing effective clean power sector strategies. RAP partnered with Constructive to create a new website and communications design system, which helped stakeholders around the globe navigate the complexities of power sector policy, regulation, and markets for the sake of advancing clean energy. See behind the scenes of our work with RAP to make their site and system more impactful.
2021: American Forests
Founded in 1875, American Forests is a leading environmental nonprofit and the oldest forest conservation organization in America. Two years after the organization charted a bold, new strategy to expand a national reforestation movement and lead the DEI conversation on Tree Equity, American Forests was ready to re-imagine their website to live up to their mission and the moment. Together, we dived deep into their history, strategic plan, and vision for the future—then, we designed a bold, new website for American Forests that tells their story; connects audiences to an array of issues, programs, and resources; and drives fundraising and volunteering. Learn more about our work to refresh the American Forests website.
2023: EDF+Business
EDF+Business and its parent organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, aimed to translate corporate climate pledges into tangible climate action. To achieve this, they needed to create a tool that organized an extensive breadth of resources, roadmaps, and strategies that companies could use to reach net-zero emissions—and they had to do so within an accelerated timeline to launch at Climate Week 2023. Together, we created the Net Zero Action Accelerator, an accessible website and digital tool that helps sustainability experts and implementation strategists chart their organizations’ paths to net zero.
2023: The Overbrook Foundation
The Overbrook Foundation was established in 1948 by Frank and Helen Altschul as a way to support important causes across New York City, the United States, and the world. Now, the organization honors their legacy by supporting partner organizations focused on advancing human rights and conserving the natural environment. In its 75th year, The Overbrook Foundation engaged Constructive on a project to recreate their website and brand. Elevating the organization’s dual commitment to the environment and to human rights played a critical role in our discovery, branding, and design processes. Together, we co-created a website and brand that reflects The Overbrook Foundation’s forward thinking, boldness, passion, and strategic impact.
2023: The Climate Trust
The Climate Trust is one of the oldest carbon entities in the United States and one of the most trusted experts in carbon offset development and funding. The Climate Trust has always operated under the belief that the land we depend on holds cultural, familial, civic, and historical significance. In 2022, the organization embarked on a new strategic plan that sought to center that belief and accelerate The Climate Trust’s commitment to honoring our natural world and preserving the promise of our future through good land stewardship. Led by Executive Director Julius Pasay, The Climate Trust engaged Constructive as a partner to help build a revitalized brand and website that aligned with the organization’s new strategic direction.
In Progress: Urban Sustainability Directors Network
The Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) is an organization dedicated to partnering with local governments and organizations to cultivate a community of leaders and resources. Along with an updated public site, the organization is partnering with Constructive on a transformative journey to enhance its membership experience, with the goal of better cultivating its community of over 3,000 members. With sights set on facilitating workshops, trainings, and knowledge exchanges between members, USDN’s new member site will help them foster stronger relationships, grow their membership network, and create an experience that solidifies their status as a community hub. Constructive is proud to stand with USDN and advance this transformation so that the organization can have an even greater impact in advancing sustainable solutions across local governments.
In Progress: Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI)
RMI is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization focused on accelerating the clean energy transition and improving lives. Since 1982, RMI has collaborated with policymakers, business leaders, government officials, and academics—earning its reputation as an industry leader in the decarbonization movement. RMI is committed to making a lasting impact for our climate. Now, Constructive and RMI will work together to amplify their impact with a revitalized website and design system to match.
Building brands that meet the moment
To save the planet, it’ll take more than any one person or organization. It’ll take collective action, coordination across the academy, nonprofits, government, and industry. Throughout our 25-year history, we’re proud of the role we’ve played in accelerating the impact of organizations on the front lines of the climate crisis.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Constructive can partner with your organization to accelerate environmental solutions, get in touch with us.
Our Founder and Executive Director Matt Schwartz was recently invited onto The Real Leaders Podcast. Below is the transcript of his and host Laura McKinney’s fascinating conversation about leadership philosophy, organizational alignment, building Constructive, and more, edited for clarity.
Company is Community: Matt’s Interview with Real Leaders
Laura McKinney: Welcome to the Real Leaders Podcast. My name is Laura McKinney and I am your host here with Matt Schwartz, the Founder and Executive Director of Constructive. Matt, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
Matt Schwartz: Absolutely, Laura. Thanks for having me.
Laura McKinney: Of course. So, to start, I know that in brand strategy and the design space, a lot of people are interested in social impact work right now and there’s a high demand for it—especially in the digital space. Tell us how your business is set apart from all the other brand strategy and digital firms out there.
Matt Schwartz: Sure. Well, I we so focus exclusively on social impact and we were one of the earlier agencies to do both brand strategy and digital. Today, that’s no longer a significant differentiator. There are a lot more agencies that fit that model than when we started 23 years ago. For us, what I’ll say is that I believe that we take a different view of how to translate brand strategy into brand value, especially through digital—and do so specifically through a social impact lens.
When I started my career about 27 years ago now, I started as a designer and then got very interested in brand strategy about 16 or 17 years ago—looking closely at how brand strategy connects to organizational strategy and can help improve organizational decision making. And because of my background in branding and design, I was very interested in using the insights that brand strategy generates as a center point for what a nonprofit brand looks like, sounds like, what the experience is like, and what people think about it.
So, since we’ve evolving this approach to integrating brand strategy and design for social impact for a long time now, I think Constructive takes a different and deeper approach to how we position and develop nonprofit brands. I think we take a rigorous approach that goes beyond things like simple brand positioning and brand personality. There’s a lot more to dig into that has greater value for organizations.
Laura McKinney: A hundred percent. That’s really interesting. I think that’s a really refreshing perspective on diving deeper than that surface level that is rampant in a lot of ways. Now Matt, tell me why this? Why brand strategy, why digital design—of all the things that you could do in the world, why did you choose to do this work?
Matt Schwartz: So, growing up I was one of those kids who focused on English and art. I did a lot of writing and I did a lot of fine art. I originally went to college for writing. Then, after my first year, I got more interested in fine arts and dug into that. Then I moved into studying graphic design, both in college and after I graduated. I graduated college in 1993, and that was good timing as far as interactive design because I kind of spilled out into the beginning of the commercial internet. I started working in interactive in probably in 1995 or 1996. It was really the Wild West back then. It was before there were even web standards. So, I was lucky because I kind learned how to design interactive as the industry matured. Then, I decided I wanted to do my own thing and I started my own company.
The reason that I chose to do social impact work is probably because I grew up pretty politically and socially minded. I grew up a punk rock kid and the political ethos of that movement was a big part of who I was. So that informed and still informs how I live my life. As I started working on my own, I realized that I could choose to do work in the social impact space and be connected to organizations that I appreciated doing that kind of work.
So, as to why I choose this work, Laura, it goes back to your first question about why I think Constructive is different. Design is much more than just graphic design. Paraphrasing a great saying by Herbert Simon, he said that “anyone designs who engages in the act of taking existing situations and turning them into preferred ones.”
Laura McKinney: I love that.
Matt Schwartz: So, design doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with making a thing. Nonprofits are engaged in the design of creating a better world. For me, there’s a feeling of the nonprofits Constructive works with being kindred spirits.
There are a lot of interesting things in design thinking, service design, and human-centered design that inform how we approach our work. Anything that isn’t part of the natural world is designed. People made it for people for a specific outcome. So, design is about the context for which you create something. For us at Constructive, brand strategy—a really deep understanding of organizational strategy and audiences—is the context we believe is needed to do great work. That’s why I do this work. I care about the world in which we live, and this is my and our opportunity to do something about it.
Laura McKinney: That’s pretty punk rock. Matt! I love that. I really do. And I think it’s that unique approach, as I was saying earlier, to go under the surface with your clients—to help your clients get to that deeper meaning of what they’re trying to achieve in their social impact.
Matt Schwartz: Brand strategy is about creating organizational clarity. Our goal is to help people understand themselves, their organization, and their opportunities—who they are, what they do, and why it matters. In all of our work, we start with research and discovery—interviews, surveys, desk research, and collaborative workshops to understand a nonprofit from the inside and outside.
From there, we develop a brand strategy and messaging platform that speaks to the things that social impact brands need to so that they can position themselves effectively and then design brand experiences for engagement. Constructive’s brand messaging framework builds out a narrative progressively. Imagine it hierarchically starting from the top and working its way down.
It starts with the purpose. Why does the world need the organization? What is the brand’s reason for being? I see a big part of this being giving voice to people who are underrepresented or to the planet, which doesn’t have a voice.
Then there’s the mission, which is a nonprofit’s call to action. I think every social impact organization can relate to that. Next is the vision, which we believe is really important to articulate with detail. It’s about what the world looks like when an organization achieves its mission—making the aspirational value tangible; making the value and the benefits of the mission resonant for people. And with a nonprofit’s vision clear, we can then define specific goals. So, what are the concrete things, near-term and long-term, that are connected to the vision, that need to be accomplished to accomplish the mission?
We build on the mission by infusing it with values. So, we want to be clear on what the non-negotiable things are that guide everything an organization does.
For many nonprofits, we then may want to articulate a logic model or a theory of change. This is often an evidence-based explanation that says, whether it’s us or somebody else doing the work,. this approach is how you create the best outcomes.
Next is defining the audience, or the brand community—people who contribute to and benefit from an organization’s work. Why do we want and need each other? What’s that mutual exchange of value, the benefit? How do we engage each other?
With the things clear, we now define what we call “brand roles.” This is the work an organization does—their areas of expertise and where they best qualified to lead. We approach defining each of a nonprofit’s work areas by using a value proposition framework. So, why is this role that the organization performs needed? Who’s involved in it? What are the benefits or the value the work creates for people and the mission?
Once you’ve defined a nonprofit’s roles, you can add strengths and differentiators. We’re describing why an organization is particularly good at doing these things that are essential to the mission.
And once we have all of this mission and organizational strategy stuff defined, THEN we can get into things like, what’s the brand persona? What are our brand attributes? What do we sound like? What is the brand experience like? What do people feel when they engage with an organization and what do they remember about it?
So our nonprofit brand strategy and messaging framework is about uncovering and using these insights to inform how we approach design.
Laura McKinney: Those are gems. You just helped so many of our listeners, whether you know it or not. I feel like a lot of the people that listen to this podcast, they’re fiercely focused on defining and getting better at whatever their business is.
I’m curious how you keep up in the digital space. It’s changing so fast all the time. How do you, how do you stay on top of it? Do you constantly feel like you’re treading water or do you feel like you have a good handle on it?
Matt Schwartz: Well, there’s, the way I used to do it and maybe the way I do it now—or at least don’t have to do as much of that as I used to, might be a better way of saying it. Designers are the ultimate magpies. Designers are always remixing ideas. We’re constantly seeking inspiration, looking at what’s going on, and picking the things that resonate with us. So I just think it starts with keeping your eyes, ears, and mind open.
One of our core values at Constructive is an ethos of continuous learning. That’s your best ally in staying up to date. So we have what we call “design deconstructions,” where we take design that we appreciate and talk about different aspects of it. We haveSlack channels where we share things that inspire us.And there’s professional development work that we do as a company.
I think one more important thing that it’s great to be individually focused, but so much of our work is interdependent. Content strategy, brand strategy, technology strategy, design strategy in the digital space in particular—all those things connect to one another. Choices that you make in one arena influence somebody else’s. So it’s important to be collectively sharing. So, we do retrospectives of projects, we do “Lunch & Learns” where one team or person explains something they’re learning to everyone. So, a lot of staying current is just knowledge sharing.
Laura McKinney: I love that outlook of kind of deconstructing something to put it back together. I think it’s a good way to gain perspective. Going further into the digital realm, what do you think is successful for your clients? Is it video, audio, or text? Is it pictures?
Matt Schwartz: I think it depends on the client, Laura, Every organization has different goals, different audiences , and different ways of effectively communicating. So, for policy and advocacy organizations—the knowledge mobilization space, where we do a lot of work—these organizations do a lot of publishing and advocacy work. Capacity building nonprofits work on strengthening for the sector. These types of nonprofits have very different needs than say a food bank or a grassroots nonprofit. So, infographics and video are effective for breaking things down. We’re very interested in long-form content publishing and the “bite, snack, meal” approach to content strategy—delivering different amounts of content based on whether someone wants a small taste or wants to dive in.
Laura McKinney: I love that.
Matt Schwartz: Statistics and quantifiable information is really valuable for some audiences, infographics can explain and break down a complex system. Sometimes it’s just powerful storytelling. It can be photojournalism.
The way I like to think about how to make a nonprofit’s work relevant is an idea in Constructive’s approach that looks at three pillars of brand of value for nonprofits., They are Credibility, Proximity, and Impact. The way we think about this is that a person who is interested in a nonprofit is usually interested in the issue they work on. Let’s say it’s climate change. If I’m interested in climate change, I first want to know the organization is credible. Why should I pay attention to them?
There are different ways to communicate credibility. So, organizational history—perhaps an interactive timeline—might show an organization’s impact over time. Showcasing expertise and the people behind the work at a nonprofit can reinforce credibility.
Why proximity matters is that is that proximity is about access. A person who cares about an issue may not be able to go where the change happens. It could be work in another country or it could be working on policy in the Beltway or in a state legislature. Communications and design that either make people feel like they are closer to those spaces or let them know that your nonprofit is reinforces the credibility an organization has. It lets the audience know that a nonprofit can put that expertise, or credibility to use and accelerate change. So we think of different ways to amplify this.
And then there’s impact—communicating what a nonprofit has accomplished and what it can accomplish, which there are countless ways to demonstrate through communications and design.
Laura McKinney: Fascinating. So, how do you conduct market research on who you’re working with?
So I think show up for clients as a partner who does know a decent amount about their impact space if its owner of those three. Awe have years of research speaking to stakeholders in these space and analyzing peer organizations. We also add issue framing research to our work to deepen our understanding of how the public understands the issues, which helps us communicate about them more effectively. So we often show up with strong startup knowledge, if you will, that I think makes us good thought partners.
However, even organization is unique, and the saying I often repeat to clients is “we will never know less about you than we know right now.” So, we know we may have a strong understanding an issue or a space, but every organization has specific needs, goals, and aspirations. It’s our job to build on that knowledge base we may already have by getting to know an organization and its people deeply.
Laura McKinney: You work in the education space and some of your clients have included universities like University of Chicago and Yale University, um, and institutions that have been around for years and years and years and years, um, and have such great reputations. How do you help them evolve and innovate, their institutions through your work? What are those conversations like?
Matt Schwartz: So on the education side of things, there are agencies that specialize in higher ed. They often do the website for a university that drives admissions. We don’t specialize in that kind of work. When we’re working with universities such as Yale or the University of Chicago, they have research institutes and significant programs that are in de facto nonprofits that focus on a very specific issue area. So for us, our connection to those higher education brands is through the work of a significant program.
Matt Schwartz: For example, one project we did is the Air Quality Life Index, which is a pretty wild interactive tool that maps air pollution data globally at a 10-square kilometer resolution that’s collected by satellites and compares it to life expectancy and the World Health Organization air cleanliness baseline. So, it answers, what is the effect of air pollution on lifespan so that policymakers can make better decisions. That is a project of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. So that’s who we work with in that case. Another example would be work we’ve done with The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
So, to your question, we help the university innovate and develop their brand through these initiatives, which sometimes stand on their own and sometimes they need to conform strongly to the university brand standard. Each time our job is to understand where the brand we are working with lives in the hierarchy of a brand architecture?
Laura McKinney: Absolutely. And at Constructive, you have eight focus areas and six service areas, I believe, which is incredibly impressive. How do you manage it all? And could you talk a little bit about your team and how they play into making it a success?
Matt Schwartz: Sure, Laura. So, I’ve seen, our team grow and people come and go over the years. And, as a leader and as an owner, I feel so incredibly lucky and honestly, almost pinch myself about how truly great our people are and how they work together to build who we are and are. How committed they are to the idea of who we are. So, building a culture and environment where people feel engaged and can do their best work is huge for us. We have a Higher Purpose as part of our brand strategy and it’s “Engagement.”
The way our teams work—we’ve got a strategy team, a design team, we a technology team, and have a project management team. And our people work together in different ways depending on a project. The glue that over the years that I’ve grown to appreciate is having exceptional project and client management—the importance of client engagement. I started Constructive in my living room. Even when you were 5, 6, 7 people, the practitioners can manage the work to some degree and you may not have project managers. When you get to a certain size, you realize how important it is to focus on resourcing and people’s utilization and understanding how much work they can do well at once.
So, one way that we make sure that our work is a success is a weekly resource meeting with the directors of every team. We talk through what we’re doing, we forecast what might be coming in, and we just are mindful of not just a person’s workload, but also what projects get members of our team particularly excited. We think about who we think our client would really love working with because of their passion for an issue. S
Laura McKinney: Why is engagement such a mission and a vision for you? Why is that so important to your core?
Matt Schwartz: We developed this as part of our strategic planning work a couple of years ago. We actually have our annual retreat next week and will be revisiting it. So, first of all, engagement means caring. When we talk about engagement, we’re not talking about social media fluff engagement. What we’re saying is that as individuals and practitioners at Constructive, it’s incumbent upon us to be deeply engaged in our work and deeply engaged with our clients. When you’re really engaged, you’re in flow and you have the right amount of energy, the right balance of challenge and things you know how to do well. You’re engaged and that allows you to do your best work client engagement.
Also, our clients are so deeply invested in the issues in which they focus and we learn from them as experts. They’re experts. It’s a treat for us to work with folks who are experts in issues. I like to say that we get to get paid to take an ongoing course called “How the World Works” from experts focused on complex stuff. And so we have to be equally engaged with them on the issues. So it starts there and then expands. Our work is about engaging people with a brand. That brand is an exchange of value that the audience and the organization benefit from. So, engagement matters there. And then it grows out to t what it means when society is engaged; what is possible. So we look at it from as small as the individual practitioner all the way up to what does a functioning democracy that is mindful of people and the planet look like when people are engaged. That’s what we hope our work will help our clients do.
Laura McKinney: I mean, you just lit up talking about that. You’re on fire! I can tell you’re very passionate about that, it’s incredible. What is the best part to you about what you do?
Matt Schwartz: Do you mean me individually or do you mean us as a company?
Laura McKinney: You individually.
Matt Schwartz: The best part of what I do is that I get to work with really incredible people both inside Constructive and outside of it. People who are smart, thoughtful, values-driven, want to do interesting things, are visionary, and are committed. There are so many facets to it. When I started the agency, Laura, I don’t think—in fact, I know—that I would have realized that my people’s happiness and setting them up for success would be the greatest reward that I could get.
So for me, there’s a small bit of great satisfaction knowing that I have something to do with the fact that all of the people at Constructive are here. And that increasingly I can step away, let them do their thing and just be there for them when they need me, so that I can focus on my responsibilities to make Constructive great for us, great for our clients. What I say is when I stopped doing hands-on—design, as opposed to providing guidance for the team, is that my design job now is to design Constructive. It’s so great when you have really awesome people, and I have to tell you, I’ve seen it when it’s not so great. Right now, our leadership team, our directors are so phenomenal. I consider myself and everyone at Constructive so lucky that we have them. And they love working together.
So, I love that I get to help create an environment and co-create with them something where they love what they’re doing and enjoy the challenge of getting better every time. And that when they move on from Constructive, they are so much better than they were when they got here. To me, that’s the biggest reward I can ask for. So that’s what I’m focused on and that’s the best part of what I do.
Laura McKinney: Yeah. How special, I mean, it’s always about the people. It really makes a place, makes or breaks a place.
Matt Schwartz: Yup. Aa friend of mine said something once that I really liked—he said “Company is community.”
Laura McKinney: Ooh, that’s, that’s the title of the episode right there!
Matt Schwartz: That’s how I feel about us. It’s really special. I love it. I feel so fortunate and it really is a gift for me. And I know I put a lot into making it happen. But it doesn’t happen but for the people who show up every day to make it happen.
Laura McKinney: A hundred percent. And on that note, to really take it home, what is your definition of a real leader?
Matt Schwartz: Oof! Well, I’ve not thought about this in a way that I have some singular description. It’s too multifaceted. So I’ll maybe riff on some of the things that have been important to me and that I’ve realized as I’ve grown as a leader.
The first is the idea of servant leadership. There’s a book by Simon Sinek that I like a lot called Leaders Eat Last. You and others may be very familiar with it. I take that to heart. So for me, a true leader is somebody, first of all, who always puts the interests of the whole ahead of their own interests—and often puts the interest of another individual ahead of their own. Or at least makes sure that they fully understand, are listening,and are attuned to what’s going on for the people that they have to lead.
It’s critical to be willing to be challenged and to have your opinion changed. This having been said, I’ve probably got a well-earned reputation as somebody with pretty strong opinions. Maybe I do a better job now than I used to of bringing those to the table and bringing those to the group—whether that’s with clients or with the people who work at Constructive. Or even with my wife, Tonya and my friends!
But one of our core values is to lead with intention. I just think that as a leader, it’s really important to have a strong sense of what are good ideas to explore, even if you’re not saying “this is what we must do.” I think a really good leader realizes when it’s time to say, “I want you to do just this way.” The reason is that you’re always balancing that 90% of servant leadership mindset and thinking about everyone else’s contributions. And sometimes you do need to realize that you may know best. You may have the most experience in certain areas. So, as long as you’ve kept your eyes, ears, and mind open, then you can lead with that perspective.
I think the another thing that makes a good leader, for me anyway, is empathy. I think I’m what some people would call an empathetic leader. I like to show up and bring energy to the room, and I like to try to lift folks up and bring humor to the situation even while we’re being serious. So being able to relate to people—as you said before, it always comes back to people like. When I was younger, I would not have understood as well how to flex and roll with what is going on with people to understand their individual situations. I think that comes to cultivating trust and trusting people. The more you give trust, the easier it is to have empathy because you trust the person has good motives.
And then the last part, which is something that I’ve learned from our people who are better than I am, is having a plan or structure. In the Traction model of organizational development. I’m that visionary leader type. Someone who has 20 ideas on any given day, and you should probably ignore 18 of them. Well, that integrator role in the book “Traction,” exists because you need implementation. A great vision is nothing without a good strategy and a plan to execute it. So, I have just learned to not just appreciate, but to thank my lucky stars that we have people who can take on a torrent of ideas and vision or excitement to do great things as a company and break it down or push back. So I think great leaders have to either do that natively or really know how to leverage people who do know how to do it—and play by their rules so that the plan gets executed as designed.
Laura McKinney: Beautiful. Matt, thank you. Thanks so much. I think our listeners are gonna walk away with just new lessons in compassion, empathetic leadership, and having a team-minded community mentality in their business—whether it’s their own personal business and people that they work for themselves and bringing that into, into their own lives. So I can’t thank you enough. I think a lot of people are going to get a lot out of this, including myself. It was an honor to talk to you today.
Matt Schwartz: Thanks Laura. I hope so.
Laura McKinney: Thank you. And for Real Leaders Magazine, I am Laura McKinney signing off as your host and we will catch you next time. Make sure to stay real, my friends.
When it comes to publishing toolkits, impact reports, policy reports, or an annual report, nonprofits have two options: print/PDF and digital. These publications are staples of nonprofit communications strategy. While an annual report delivers a focused brand narrative and summary of the year that reinforces why an organization’s work matters, for policy advocacy nonprofits and think tanks, or nonprofits engaged in research and the sciences, reports and toolkits represent something far more significant—they are the work. Knowledge mobilization is at the center of delivering research and recommendations in ways that are accessible and actionable for audiences—engaging, educating, and motivating people to inform dialogue, influence policy, and improve entire sectors. And if the medium is indeed the message, then how well research and policy reports engage audiences online will greatly determine how effective they are in advancing thought leadership to make change happen.
The decision of whether or not to create a digital toolkit or digital report is an important one. It’s also a choice that should be easy. Simply put, going digital is all but certain to create more value and deliver better results for nonprofits than publishing static PDFs. Yes, digital represents a bigger investment in time and money than publishing a PDF. And this investment is also likely to generate outsized returns.
Sure, there are reasons that print/PDF reports work for nonprofits. One reason we often hear is that an organization’s audience is older and “just likes print.” Fair enough—and if this is the case for your nonprofit, then either committing fully to print or, even better, designing a print report with a digital complement that will reach a wider audience may make a lot of sense. It’s important, though, to make a distinction between print and PDF. While the trend is towards digital, a professionally printed report can create a great reading experience that you just can’t deliver online. Publishing a PDF and expecting audiences who want a physical copy to print it on their home printer, however, is decidedly not that. And simply posting a PDF policy report and hoping that “downloads equals engagement” is more wishful thinking than true insight of a report’s effectiveness.
Digital reports and toolkits, by contrast, provide a far more sure thing when it comes to delivering content that will connect with audiences and in evaluating the impact of the work that goes into producing them. So, if your nonprofit is evaluating whether to make the shift to digital-first publishing, then what are the benefits of a digital annual report or digital policy report?
The Top Benefits of Publishing Digital Reports for Nonprofits.
Digital annual reports are more accessible. People are online more than ever before and more than half of all web visits happen on mobile devices. Reports are designed to engage, educate, and motivate an audience to act. So, doesn’t it make sense to deliver an annual report or policy report online in a way that they’ll actually enjoy? Reading a PDF on your phone is anything but a good experience. Today, there are endless combinations of device types, screen resolutions, and personal settings that make every person’s online experience a little different.
By creating digital reports with best practices in responsive design, like Constructive did with the Serious Illness Messaging Toolkit and the Dual Language Learner’s Guide, content is going to be delivered in a way that makes it easy to navigate, enjoyable to read, and, as a result, more resonant. Another way that digital-first reports are more accessible and inclusive? They are easier for vision-impaired audiences to use assistive technologies like screen readers with—making publishing digital reports a commitment to these values.
Digital annual reports increase visibility. Digital annual reports aren’t just more accessible to humans, they’re also far more friendly to machines—specifically, search engines. Search engines like Google reward websites created with content that’s easy for them to index, and nonprofit reports are filled with the kind of valuable content that search engines love. HTML web pages are far easier for search engines to index than PDFs, so publishing a digital annual report or a policy report for your nonprofit is going to rank higher in search than posting a PDF. This translates directly to increased engagement and greater impact, delivering greater return on the investment in time and money that it takes nonprofits to produce their reports. Search engines also favor websites with responsive design, adding another boost to a well-designed, mobile-friendly digital report.
A digital report also makes the most of this visibility through search engine optimization, making organic search traffic more targeted and driving audiences to the content that’s relevant to them more quickly. That’s because internet searches that your nonprofit’s report ranks for will link directly to the page with the content a person is interested in—which is extremely helpful in something like a 120-page policy report on climate change! By contrast, when a PDF comes up in a search result, your audience will have to download the report, open it, and search again to find what they want. Even better, by including SEO tools like Yoast into a digital report website, nonprofits can curate what search engines display in their description of any page in their reports and customize page URLs and meta content to rank better for specific terms.
Digital annual reports give you greater insights. If a person downloads a PDF and doesn’t read it, does it have an impact? That’s the hard truth nonprofits that rely on PDF annual reports, policy reports, and impact reports face. While many organizations track report downloads as a measure of effectiveness, they’re really not a reliable indicator of how useful content is to audiences because it’s impossible to know what someone does after they download a PDF. Conversely, digital reports enjoy all of the benefits of website analytics, giving you valuable insights into who your audiences are, how they’re finding you, and what content they’re engaging with. And by knowing more about who your audience is and what’s resonating in the reports that you produce, your nonprofit can measure and optimize to continuously improve, which is particularly valuable to nonprofits that publish in high volumes, such as think tanks and policy advocacy organizations.
Most people who work in communications are familiar with Google Analytics. When it comes to your nonprofit’s reports, it will tell you where people are coming from, how they are finding you, and what pages they’re reading, giving you insights into your audience and into content engagement . Going a bit deeper with UX analytics like our favorite, Crazy Egg, we can gain even deeper insights into where people are focusing their attention on every page within a report and how they’re interacting with it. Taken together, website analytics for digital reports provide nonprofits with invaluable feedback to improve how they mobilize knowledge online through their reports.
Digital reports are more shareable. While there’s nothing stopping someone from sharing PDF report on social media or email, digital reports provide the opportunity to significantly increase visibility of their content. First, sharing functionality can be designed directly into the report, providing calls-to-action that increase the likelihood that someone will share your nonprofit’s report. Second, audiences will have the ability to share any page from a research report, policy report, or annual report—allowing them to curate their message and direct people to the specific content that they believe is valuable to their audience. By contrast, someone sharing a large policy report would have to both make it clear that the link will start a PDF download and also tell their audience what page the useful idea they want to share is on.
Lastly, as mentioned before, by adding software like Yoast to curate the content metadata for your digital report, social media platforms will deliver the exact summary you want for each and every page, allowing you to curate the message that goes out, providing audiences with insight into what each page in your nonprofit’s report has to offer, and increasing the relevance of your report’s content when it shows up in a person’s social media feed.
Digital reports educate audiences more effectively. Nonprofits such as research institutes and policy advocacy organizations that work in spaces requiring specialized knowledge are no strangers to jargon. And while there are often cries to “get rid of the jargon” in nonprofit communications, for many organizations working on complex or technical issues, this just isn’t practical. In fact, eliminating critical terminology is likely to be counter productive if a nonprofit’s mission involves engaging expert audiences who expect a certain level of complexity to view research and recommendations as being credible.
Luckily, with digital reports, nonprofits can communicate effectively with expert and non-expert audiences even more effectively than they can in print or PDF—educating the uninitiated as they read while reassuring experts who demand rigor in their research. Features like an interactive glossary and interactive footnotes makes jargon more accessible to lay audiences and elevates the source material that adds credibility to research—as we did for The Drug Pricing Lab to help them better explain the abuses of government programs and regulations on drug pricing. And with interactive charts, everything from impact statistics in an annual report to quantitative research in a think tank’s policy report make it possible for audiences to look closely at the numbers, adding depth of understanding to the data.
Digital reports are always up-to-date. While many reports are snapshots in time and do not need to be updated, there are nonprofit research and policy reports that can benefit from having current information, especially if that information is about the current state of an issue. Of course, when someone downloads a PDF, the information they have is static. But the content in a digital report can be updated and refreshed, creating an environment for living content and ongoing audience engagement. When a research or policy report is digital, it remains the single source of truth—and that source can be either dynamically or manually updated at any time. That’s not just helpful for keeping information up-to-date, it can be a lifesaver if there’s incorrect information in a nonprofit’s report.
Digital reports are more engaging. Last, but not least, when a nonprofit produces digital reports instead of static PDF reports, there are countless opportunities to make your content more engaging—and as a result, make it more memorable, useful, and impactful. Animations and interaction design techniques, both subtle and profound, can bring a report’s content to life on the screen and direct readers’ attention to what matters most. This can be particularly important for keeping readers engaged in long, single-page digital reports from start to finish, like our team did in St. David’s Foundation’s 2022 Impact Report and in The Legal Aid Society’s Annual Report. Animation can also add an emotional element that deepens audiences’ connection to the content so that it resonates more deeply—and also reinforces the personality of a nonprofit’s brand in the process. So, whether it’s an annual report that’s telling a nonprofit’s story for the year or a research report from a think tank to inform public policy, adding interactive design polish can add depth and richness to the content that goes beyond the words themselves.
Truthfully, there are plenty more benefits to publishing digital reports for your nonprofit. And, taken together, it’s easy to see how, whether it’s an annual report to tell your brand’s story for the year or a policy report providing research and recommendations to drive systemic change, delivering your content in the way it’s intended to be published online delivers greater impact and value for your mission.
A website is one of, if not the most important strategic assets a nonprofit has in representing itself to the world. Given its value, it’s also important to make sure that the strategy and execution of a website are deeply informed by and closely aligned with another vital strategic asset—an effective brand strategy. Get these two things right and get them “talking” with each other, so to speak, and a nonprofit has about 80% of what it needs to support both its organizational strategy and its strategic communications.
The truth is that brand strategy is the essential foundation for all design and communications, whether this means a visual identity or website. And when it comes to a website, the value of an effective nonprofit brand strategy really shines. That’s because the breadth of things that a website can do and must do well to support a nonprofit make deep alignment with the brand strategy that guides the organization vitally important.
What are some of these important things that a nonprofit’s website must do and how are they connected to brand strategy?
Of course, a nonprofit’s website is essential to brand communications. It’s often the first place people go when they learn about an organization. It remains the epicenter of digital communications, with marketing channels and external media continuously directing people there—kind of an “all roads lead to Rome” in communications strategy. This makes a nonprofit’s website its ultimate brand ambassador, remaining ready to welcome audiences in and engage them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s a platform for articulating the who, what, when, where, why, and how of a nonprofit’s impact strategies—a powerful window into a nonprofit’s world and the ecosystem in which it exists. And through the many choices made in a website’s content, design, and functionality, it becomes an expression of a nonprofit’s values and a connection to the value the organization has to offer.
For some nonprofits, particularly research institutes, think tanks and nonprofits who deliver service online, a website is much more than just a platform for brand storytelling. It’s also a primary channel for advancing the work—whether this means knowledge mobilization to address climate change, providing resources and professional development for teachers, or increasing access to vital mental health care services. For associations and member-based nonprofits, websites are invaluable to building and connecting community. For advocacy nonprofits, a website often drives support for campaigns. And, of course, for organizations who fund their programs through individual donations, their website is a vital fundraising channel.
That’s a lot of heavy lifting! And it doesn’t stop here because a nonprofit’s website is about more than these essential external-facing roles that it plays for the brand. It’s also integral to operations—a tool that staff often rely on to do their daily work. For some nonprofits, staff may be some of the most heavy users of the software that the website is built on. If there’s an intranet involved, even more so. Modern nonprofit brand strategy theory emphasizes its ability to increase capacity, and the same holds true for websites, which empower teams working on community building, grants management reporting, research publishing, and more. And just like the quality of the experiences that a website creates for external audiences says a lot about its brand, so does how well the workflows and integrations empower staff to connect with the work.
The Power of Brand Strategy in Design
What makes brand strategy so valuable to creating a website that expresses what a nonprofit stands for and engages people inside and outside the organization in the mission? The way I think about it is that design (in the most encompassing sense of the word) is all about context. Anything that is designed (which is to say, everything that is not part of the natural environment) is designed for a specific use, for a specific person or group of people, to be used in a specific place or way, and for a specific goal or goals. In short, to design successfully, you must understand context—and you must design for context.
Design is also inherently done for someone other than the designer. When design is successful, it can almost become secondary—an intuitive experience that is fully about the activities it makes possible and what we think and feel about the experience. That’s why the best design takes a human-centered approach to meeting these needs. So, to design websites that do all of the important things mentioned above, the more deeply we understand a nonprofit and the context in which it exists, the more effective we are likely to be at uniting design, content, and technology that are aligned with the organization’s purpose and people’s positive perceptions of the brand. And, as a result, the greater the value a nonprofit’s website is likely to deliver for the audiences it’s created for.
The place where you find all of this invaluable context is in a brand strategy. Which is why it is so important that a nonprofit’s website be built on a foundation that includes it. As someone who has been a designer and a brand strategist throughout my career, I’ve felt the power of this connection first-hand. When teams that collaborate on a website design have a deep understanding and appreciation for what the brand truly stands for, and the value it creates for different stakeholders and the world in pursuit of its mission, the better they are at translating these ideas into brand engagement online.
When Website Redesigns Come Up Short
When nonprofits initiate a website redesign, the problems in need of solving inevitably include things like “confusing navigation,” “not user friendly,” “content hard to find,” “not engaging or visually appealing,” and, perhaps most most telling of all, “does not represent who we really are,” or “fails to clearly communicate our mission and work.” These are all the basics of an effective website, so it’s surprising how often nonprofits feel that their websites fail to succeed on these measures.
But perhaps not. As explained earlier, websites can be really complex. A lot goes into them and they require the collaboration of interdisciplinary teams of strategists, content strategists, UX designers, visual designers, writers, engineers—and of course, multiple stakeholders from the nonprofit itself. All of these experts need to work together with a clear vision for how a website with both represent an organization and deliver on its brand promises. They must make sense of an incredibly complex set of tangible and intangible ideas that represent what a nonprofit stands for and translate it into a cohesive online experience that engages, informs, and activates people to participate in the mission.
Remember, a nonprofit’s website is its 24/365 brand ambassador—one that must anticipate all of the needs and wants of visitors so that it can successfully meet them. It is one of the key conduits for audiences to connect to the value a nonprofit has to offer. As the saying goes, execution follows strategy. And when we try to clearly communicate the who, what, when, where, how, and why of a nonprofit’s work, if we limit the lens we use in design is limited to digital strategy, then the solutions we come up with are almost certainly going to be website specific. We might end up with better looking, better functioning, more “user-friendly” websites. But we are also less likely to create websites that are the embodiment of a nonprofit’s brand and active contributors to mission implementation.
Forget About User Experience!
User experience design (UX) is the foundation of website design. It’s impossible to design a great website without great UX design. But nobody visits a website looking to have a great user experience. They visit for the opportunities that a website creates for them to interact with an organization. A person may not think to themselves that they are visiting a website for a brand experience, but that’s what’s happening
So, while UX design is an essential discipline to successful website design, I think it should be reframed to go further than some of its limiting definitions of success (e.g., “user-friendliness,” “aligning user and business goals”). Again, if the lens through which we plan is a website-specific discipline, then the solutions we design are very likely to also be website specific. When our goals are much loftier than “online conversions” or “page views”—when we are working to address a significant social and environmental issues and hope to empower an organization and its audiences to work together towards significant impact, there’s a lot of value in understanding the deeper underlying dynamics about why the brand matters.
Consumer brands have focused on the principles of customer experience design for some time. For social change organizations, this means creating an experience that is more ambitious than the “buying cycle”; it means creating experiences with the specific objectives of educating our audiences, deepening their engagement with our cause, and, ultimately, helping people from different backgrounds and with different skills and resources to contribute to solving a serious problem—often one that requires sustaining engagement for the long-term despite the difficulty inherent in measuring progress toward our goal. In this, the experiences a website creates are significantly about building a brand relationship rather than being transactional.
Build Brand Experiences
So, if your organization is looking to redesign its website and has never taken the time to develop a brand strategy, now would be a good time to do so. Yes, it will require time, money, and patience. But it is an investment well worth making—and one that will pay you back many times over. What’s more, not only will your team be energized by the process, you’ll be amazed by how much easier decision making about things like website structure, navigation, content strategy, and design is when it’s clear to all what the real value of your organization to its audiences is.
However, it’s not always possible to undertake a significant brand strategy process—and that’s OK! That’s because it’s very possible to integrate elements of the brand strategy process into the research, strategy, and design phases of a website redesign. While your nonprofit won’t gain the organization-wide benefits that flow from defining an effective brand strategy, integrating brand strategy thinking and exercises into a redesign absolutely will ensure that your website is more effective at communicating and connecting people to your nonprofits value.
Whichever approach you take, before you jump into the website redesign, be sure to pull your key stakeholders together and engage them in the kind of thoughtful strategic exploration that should inform every branding process. Doing so will enable you to build your website—and the brand experience—around the deeper, underlying values that do so much to energize audiences to believe in your brand and support your mission.
