Artificial intelligence is everywhere—from the apps we use daily to the workflows reshaping how we work. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have made Large Language Models (LLMs) widely accessible—sparking excitement and concern across the social impact space.
For nonprofits, this moment presents a critical opportunity to not just adopt AI but to shape how it’s used ethically, equitably, and intentionally. While AI has the potential to amplify nonprofit impact, it also risks reinforcing the same inequities that nonprofits are working to dismantle. As the technology continues to advance, nonprofits must be included in the conversation and creation of these tools.
In this edition of Constructively Curated, we’re exploring the promise, pitfalls, and practical steps your organization can take to stay grounded in your brand values while exploring this technology. To help you navigate the noise, we’ve compiled a list of resources for nonprofits looking to make the most of AI tools while keeping ethics front and center.
1. Develop Artificial Intelligence Literacy
What is AI, anyway? Before diving into tools and strategies, it’s important to ensure everyone on your team shares a baseline understanding of the foundational concepts, common terms, and how to approach AI with a critical eye. This roundup from Zapier includes 8 AI courses for beginners, and LinkedIn Learning offers free courses to get you (and your team) started.
2. Explore Frameworks for Responsible AI
NTEN’s resource hub is a go-to starting point for nonprofits exploring responsible AI adoption. It offers practical guides and tools to help you surface key questions, assess potential risks, and embed equity and transparency in your AI-related projects. Here you’ll also find a helpful generative AI use policy, do’s and don’ts for chatbots, and example questions for generative AI vendors to help you implement AI with integrity.
3. Build an Ethical AI Culture
Responsible AI isn’t just about tools—it’s about building a culture rooted in trust and shared values. IBM’s 5 pillars of ethical AI—fairness, explainability, robustness, transparency, and data privacy—can serve as an example of how to evaluate and implement AI tools, especially when working with sensitive data or vulnerable communities. For more guidance, explore resources from UNESCO, the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, or watch this video from MIT Sloan on building an ethical AI culture.
4. Establish and Circulate Your AI Governance Policy
Once your team is aligned on values and direction, it’s time to put it into practice. Nonprofits are quickly jumping on using AI but are still playing catch-up when it comes to governance. A survey by the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG) found that while 81% of foundations are experimenting with AI, just 30% have an AI policy in place, and only 9% have an advisory group. AI governance is crucial for mitigating bias, protecting privacy, preventing misuse, and ensuring accountability. To get started, check out this AI policy template from Afua Bruce and Rose Afriyie for NTEN.
5. Acknowledge Bias to Reduce Harm
AI isn’t created in a vacuum—it reflects the people, systems, and biases that exist in the real world. That’s why it’s essential for nonprofits to approach AI-generated content with a critical, ethical storytelling lens. Tools that auto-generate photos or illustrations can reinforce harmful stereotypes or lack representation. Before using AI-generated imagery, ask: Does this image reflect the diversity of the communities we serve? Are we avoiding tokenism or visual clichés? For a deeper look at how this evolving technology can be designed with equity in mind, we recommend The Tech That Comes Next—a powerful read from Afua Bruce and Amy Sample Ward on how changemakers, philanthropists, and technologists can build more inclusive systems. We also recommend listening to this episode of the Talk Justice podcast featuring Afua Bruce, Kevin De Liban, and Keith Porcaro covering how to prevent harm amidst the AI hype cycle.
6. Stay True to Your Brand Values
AI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. This article from AFP highlights how to leverage AI while keeping your brand mission, vision, and values intact. For example, if inclusivity and diversity are core to your brand, you can “commit to using high-quality, accurately representative data to mitigate bias and reduce the risk of perpetuating discrimination. Only work with vendors that hold themselves to the highest standards.” If your company values transparency, you could consider sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how AI is helping improve your nonprofit’s operations and delivering on your mission.
7. Identify the Right Use Cases for Your Organization
Nonprofit teams are often stretched thin—juggling tight budgets, limited staff, and busy schedules. AI can help lighten the administrative task load by automating time-consuming tasks, freeing up capacity for your team to focus on strategic, high-impact work. According to a survey from TechSoup, nonprofits that already use AI see benefits in key areas like grant writing and fundraising, marketing, and analytics. By using AI safely and ethically, you can make a huge impact on your nonprofit’s efficiency and ability to drive even more impact. Classy from GoFundMe shares 12 AI tools for nonprofits to consider.
8. Unlock AI’s Potential for Scaling Social Good
On a larger scale, AI is already helping us solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. As highlighted in The Atlantic, AI is helping our world’s most vulnerable populations stay one step ahead of climate change. Through Google.org’s Generative AI Accelerator, grantees use AI to predict floods, monitor wetland ecosystems, and address environmental threats to agriculture. And a 2023 BCG report found that AI has the potential to unlock insights that could help mitigate 5-10% of global greenhouse emissions by 2030. There’s increasing enthusiasm about the impactful role AI can play in meeting the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
9. Weigh the Climate Cost of Everyday AI Use
While AI has the potential to support large-scale climate initiatives, we also need to consider the environmental cost of everyday use. Researchers estimate that a single ChatGPT prompt consumes about five times more electricity than just doing a simple web search. With over 123 million people using ChatGPT daily, the energy demand is impossible to ignore. And like we said previously, AI models are being used to mitigate climate risk and avoid disasters—making this a clear catch-22. It’s worth asking: How can your organization adopt AI in ways that are both sustainable and intentional? Read more about the environmental impact of GenAI from MIT and the uneven distribution of AI’s environmental impacts in Harvard Business Review.
Closing Thoughts
In an age of automation, human connection will become more important than ever. As this article from Bloomerang articulates, “There’s no outsourcing the human soul.” While AI can and will automate tasks, it can’t replace the empathy and human-centered thinking that you bring to your projects and organization’s mission. “Sometimes only a human being can deliver on the job to be done.” For more on human-centered AI (HCAI), read the overview from the Interaction Design Foundation.
We’re curious—how is your team using AI to advance your mission? Get in touch and share your approach, lessons learned, or questions you’re exploring.
While research proves that the quality of your website’s design has an outsized influence on the credibility of your brand and how trusted it is, the primary reason why people visit your nonprofit online is to engage with your content. Every word on a website, from the body copy we read to the buttons we click, serves a purpose. Taking a strategic approach to content creation is critical to framing a narrative, building trust, increasing engagement, and generating action.
Some website content positions your brand, expresses your values, and communicates the value that you offer. What we call “strategic poetry,” the style of this content matters as much as the substance. Other content is purely informational, such as news, research reports, or staff bios. And some content doesn’t even show up on your website—it’s the metadata that populates search engine results and URL unfurls. In every case, how content is written has a direct impact on your nonprofit’s visibility and reach.
Taken together, all of this website content plays a vital role in how your nonprofit’s brand shows up in the world and how willing people are to engage. Unfortunately, despite being essential to a website’s success, content is often undervalued and overlooked in the design process. Nearly every website redesign RFP we receive rightly prioritizes the need for great UX, visual design, and engineering—while surprisingly, improving content quality is lightly mentioned or not mentioned at all. The result of starting a website redesign with this mindset is that content development isn’t budgeted for, creating content isn’t integrated into the design strategy, and a website rarely reaches its full potential.
In this Constructively Curated, we’ve collected a few resources that have helped our team make sure that the website content we create is highly effective—which we hope will help you make every word on your website count.
1. Make Your Content Readable and Scannable
There’s an overstated idea that “online audiences don’t read.” And while research by the NIH suggests that the internet is changing how our brains consume content, the reality is more nuanced. Your audience is far more likely to scroll through and scan a website rather than read it word for word, so structure matters. Short paragraphs, bullets, subheads, and legible font choices aid in readability across device types. Best practices that make content easier to consume create better brand experiences and increase the likelihood that people will return to read more. Ready to write for readability? Here are three places to start: Nielsen Norman Group’s classic research on web readability remains relevant, Siteimprove shares seven readability tests to evaluate content, and one of our favorites, Hemingway is a great writing tool to improve content clarity and concision.
2. Write for Accessibility and Inclusivity
The last decade has seen a huge increase in awareness of designing for digital accessibility. Readable, well-structured writing benefits all audiences, including those using assistive technologies like screen readers. According to a WebAIM study that looks at the homepages of the top 1,000,000 websites, they found an average of 56.8 accessibility errors per page. This has significant consequences for the usability (and discovery) of content. Writing for accessibility includes best practices such as writing descriptive links, writing alt text for visuals, and providing transcripts for multimedia content. The W3C has also created comprehensive guidelines for writing for web accessibility. Lastly, this article on Writer’s Room emphasizes how accessible writing is just good writing.
3. Improve User Experience With Clear UX Writing
UX writing is one of the more under-appreciated elements of how brands engage audiences. Think about the last time you abandoned a task online out of frustration, like signing up for a free account to access an article. Was the form confusing? Did you receive a vague error message? Every microinteraction online includes a UX writing decision. Form fields, buttons, navigation labels, prompts, error messages—the more intentional this writing is, the more it can be aligned with how a brand expresses itself and the outcomes a website creates. In their book Writing is Designing: Words and the User Experience, Andy Welfle and Michael Metts make clear how UX writing shapes the ways that people understand, experience, and engage with brands online. In this guide to content design, Lauren Pope shares specific content design tips for the social impact sector. And Sarah Winters’ book Content Design is a foundational text that covers UX writing and beyond.
4. Optimize Your Content for Search Engines (SEO)
Effective web content isn’t just well-written—it also needs to be discoverable. Writing for SEO means combining technical and content components to boost your site’s visibility. For a solid foundation, we recommend Semrush’s guide to technical SEO, which covers structured data, on-page optimization, crawl directives, and other factors influencing ranking. Content SEO involves content strategy, optimizing your copywriting for SEO, and performing keyword research. In our day-to-day work, we frequently reference Yoast SEO’s resources for practical guidance.
5. Prepare for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
How can your nonprofit appear in ChatGPT summaries or Google Gemini snippets? As generative AI adoption and search results evolve, we’ll share best practices for optimizing content to appear in chat-based results. The good news is that (for now) many of the same SEO best practices still apply. Clear structure (headers, subheads, and bullets) enhance readability, while incorporating credible sources, statistics, and research boosts authority. To learn more about generative engine optimization, you can get started with HubSpot’s guide to GEO, read Search Engine Land’s generative optimization overview, or explore more on AI overviews from Backlinko.
6. Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice Across Your Site
When you think about your nonprofit brand, you probably think of logos, colors, and fonts. But just as crucial is the language you use and how your brand shows up across digital channels, including your website. Your nonprofit’s brand voice is a powerful tool for building trust and emotional connection. A strong brand voice is consistent, recognizable, and helps your audience connect with your mission at every interaction. This consistency is especially important if your organization has microsites or local chapter pages. Unifying your messaging across touchpoints ensures your audience has the same experience with your brand, no matter where they discover you. In this post, Funraise offers tips for finding your nonprofit brand voice.
7. Continuously Monitor and Optimize Your Content
Writing effective website content isn’t a one-and-done process. As your nonprofit (or the landscape) evolves, so should your content strategy. Regularly reviewing analytics, conducting user testing, and optimizing copy based on performance ensures your content remains relevant and impactful. At Constructive, we use Crazy Egg to track our client’s website data to improve content, design, and overall UX. A few other handy resources include Smashing Magazine’s guide to testing and measuring content in UX and Looppanel’s guide to effective content testing.
Closing Thoughts
There’s a lot to consider when writing website content to ensure that it’s appropriate and effective for your nonprofit brand—balancing readability, SEO, UX, and brand voice is no small task. These resources provide steps you can take to improve your website content writing and strengthen your audience’s experience with your brand in the process. And if you’re ready to prioritize content in your website redesign, we hope you’ll get in touch. We’d love to discuss how we can help!
Looking back on 2024, our team at Constructive has explored countless tools, frameworks, and sources of inspiration that helped us stay organized, innovate, and find joy in our work. So, we asked our designers, strategists, and project managers: What inspired you in the past year? What nonprofit branding and design resources will you use going forward in 2025?
Recommended Books
Our team found inspiration in books spanning nonprofit strategy, design, and communications:
In response to recent social, political, and environmental challenges worldwide, Design as an Attitude offers a comprehensive look at design as it exists today.
Recommended by Cecilia Portillo, Client Services Lead
Most design serves capitalist ends. In Designs for the Pluriverse, Escobar shows how evolving design practices could lead to the creation of a more just, sustainable world.
Recommended by Cecilia Portillo, Client Services Lead
Educated by Tara Westover
“I found this memoir about finding truth through education eye-opening. It reminded me how something we all take for granted (learning and knowledge) can completely change somebody’s life for the better.”
— Kaylee Gardner, Digital Strategist
Drawing on decades of teaching, advising, grantmaking, and research, Engine of Impact provides a roadmap for cultivating high-achieving social impact organizations.
Recommended by Cecilia Portillo, Client Services Lead
“This book is full of effective content testing strategies and ways to get buy-in from senior leadership. Super, super valuable takeaways for any content-rich web project.”
— Katie Szymanski, Content Marketer
“It’s a classic. I found myself picking it up a lot this year when I felt blocked or uninspired. It includes lots of quick and easy ways to reframe your perspective.”
— Holly Truax, Senior Designer
Recommended Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to stay current on industry trends and uncover new ideas. Our team subscribed and kept coming back to these in 2024:
This monthly newsletter focuses on content strategy for nonprofits and provides resources for professionals “interested in making content with a purpose.”
Recommended by Katie Szymanski, Content Marketer
This newsletter is a source of design education and inspiration, becoming a go-to for branding news and trends.
Recommended by Doug Knapton, Senior Designer
This newsletter shares stories, insights, and creative inspiration from designers worldwide.
Recommended by Holly Truax, Senior Designer
“NN/g offers a great variety of newsletters that provide articles, videos on various topics, and webinars about specific practices. They always provide great insight into the simplest of things in UX. Sometimes, UX isn’t “sexy” like UI, but a product/website must be usable. If it looks great but doesn’t address user goals, the product is a failure. NN/g makes it easy to find articles and research on a wide range of topics, and its site is easy to use. I can always find insights and answers to questions quickly and have improved my best practices in UX work.”
— Kevin Ng, Senior UX Designer
“I’ve started engaging a bit more with newsletters from tools that I’m using in work (like Figma’s newsletter) because I find when I read them, I learn how to utilize the tools even better.”
— Kaylee Gardner, Digital Strategist
Recommended Podcasts
Podcasts have been a source of inspiration, learning, and creative fuel for our team. Here are a few of the shows that stood out:
Recommended by Cecilia Portillo, Client Services Lead
“This is a deeply compelling podcast that poses critical questions about America’s caregiving systems in conversations with leading experts. It recently won multiple awards, and it’s created by the now-CEO of the National Skills Coalition.”
—Tess Stewart, Senior Brand Strategist
“It always features really insightful interviews, but I recently listened to an episode with Sarah Polley that reminded me that community engagement can be a creative’s greatest source of inspiration and motivation. Also, Sarah Polley is just so cool.”
— Holly Truax, Senior Designer
Recommended Tools
From streamlining project management for large-scale nonprofit websites to optimizing design workflows, we utilized several tools to stay productive and organized. These tools empowered the team to work smarter and more efficiently:
“I tracked and completed over 4,000 tasks last year. It’s been a critical tool to help me balance my workload and meet deadlines.”
— Heather Varndell, Office Manager
“Figma allowed everyone on our team to collaborate more. We were able to build out templates for strategists to then integrate into their work. It’s important to see everyone’s mouse and “be together” in the same file while doing remote work.”
— Doug Knapton, Senior Designer
“In today’s remote working world, I find it easy to start a task and get derailed by Slack, an email alert, or a text message. I’ve combined Flow and calendar blocking to get meaningful chunks of work done. Motion helps me group similar tasks together so I minimize context switching.”
— Katie Szymanski, Content Marketer
“One game-changer: Automatic reminders for things like recurring activities, recurring calendar events, and even setting up Google alerts to receive client news and notifications. Setting all of this up in advance was key for staying on top of things over the year.”
— Kaylee Gardner, Digital Strategist
“Notion has so many great organizational templates to plan and track projects. I love to use goal trackers for projects, breaking down each phase by goals and documenting the progress. It’s an easy way to keep on top of tasks and integrate the unexpected realities of large web projects.”
— Holly Truax, Senior Designer
“UX testing is very important in getting buy-in from partners and learning more about users. The analysis tools provided by Optimal Workshop allowed us to make better sense of a large data set and helped us to create a content structure that made sense for users.”
— Kevin Ng, Senior UX Designer
Recommended Videos & Webinars
These sessions offered practical knowledge, new ideas, ways of approaching challenges, plus a chance to engage with experts in their respective fields:
The resource hub from Scott Abel features talks on content strategy, information architecture, structured content, AI, and more.
Recommended by Katie Szymanski, Content Marketer
“My overall take is that you can find inspiration and lessons to use at work, even from unlikely or unsuspecting sources and places. Be inspired by everything!” — Heather Varndell, Office Manager
Sessions she enjoyed in 2024 include:
- Achieve More With GenAI Guided by Leading Experts
- Business Strategy and Leadership with Bob Iger
- Graphic Design with David Carson
- The Art of Storytelling with Neil Gaiman
- Independent Thinking and Media’s Invisible Powers with Noam Chomsky
As best practices for organic website search evolve, it’s important to stay on top of trends and insights we can bring back to our clients and partners. Yoast SEO’s monthly webinars offer invaluable learnings for ongoing website optimization and SEO performance.
Recommended by Kaylee Gardner, Digital Strategist
Your nonprofit’s annual report is more than a recap—it’s a tool to communicate the impact you’ve made over the past year and inspire your community about what comes next. When done correctly, annual reports can mobilize fundraising, act as a tone-setter for your communications and promises over the next year, and provide a moment to reflect and thank all of your staff and partners for their work.
How can you make sure you get it right? In this roundup, we’ve gathered a collection of resources to help you plan and create an impactful annual report.
1. Get Inspired By Best Practices
Each year, Constructive’s Executive Director Matt Schwartz identifies some of the best reports for your inspiration and why we think they’re each so effective. Explore some of the most compelling reports from 2023 and exactly why we love them. (And stay tuned for our 2024 update!)
2. Tell Client Stories Ethically
In this past Constructively Curated, we outlined resources on integrating inclusive and ethical storytelling into your practice—something that is especially important when it relates to client storytelling in your annual report. The stories of those you serve can showcase your impact, but they must be shared with intentionality and authenticity in both words and visuals.
3. Build Trust from Industry Trends
Our annual reports don’t live in a vacuum. Rather, we must express an understanding of the larger industry trends at work to both connect our work to them and to make sure we’re engaging people in the most effective way. Each year, Edelman publishes its Trust Barometer: the result of research into public sentiments surrounding trust, polarization, and authority. It’s a great resource for gauging the public’s current perception of your sector and nonprofits as a whole so you can present your impact in the most trustworthy way to win over skeptical audiences.
4. Embrace Digital Formats
While many organizations still publish their annual reports as PDFs, you should consider embracing an interactive online report experience. Digital reports have a host of benefits like increasing accessibility while giving your organization more room for functionality and creativity. In this article written by Paul Sternberg, Director of UX & Strategy at Constructive, Paul makes the case for investing in a digital report. Among other things, he discusses shareability, keeping things current, and making your report more engaging.
5. Consider How to Best Visualize Your Data
Stories are compelling, but audiences will also want to see hard numbers in your annual report that speak to your impact, effectiveness, and sustainability as an organization. We need to choose how to best visualize this data so it both captures attention and communicates numbers quickly and accessibly. This Tableau resource outlines helpful data visualization tips to make your visualizations predictable, clear, and strategic.
6. Review Do’s and Don’ts from The Chronicle of Philanthropy
No annual report is the same, but The Chronicle of Philanthropy presents some hard and fast dos and don’ts that apply to almost all cases. COP elevates how we should be focusing on our readers and aiming to meet our audiences where they’re at, considering design, length, and more.
More Constructively Curated
As humans, we’ve always gravitated towards stories. We’ve gathered around fires and passed them from generation to generation. Good stories can elicit understanding and empathy, and great stories can turn empathy into action. As storytellers, nonprofit professionals are tasked with a great deal of power and responsibility. The individuals your organization serves likely have rich stories that you can utilize to both show the impact of your work and to communicate it to the public; but this needs to be done intentionally and genuinely in both words and visuals. Every organization has a story (or many stories to tell), but how we tell them is just as important as what we tell.
This is where the idea of ethical storytelling comes in. Ethical storytelling means centering your storytelling process—from first interacting with story sources to writing and publishing your story—on being respectful and true to those with lived experiences.
Ethical storytelling is an ongoing commitment to putting your communities and audiences first. When done correctly, it fosters mutual respect, strong relationships, and more poignant stories. In this roundup, we’re exploring resources and tools to help you integrate ethical storytelling practices into your organization.
1. Listening as Surrender: Ethical Storytelling and Narrative Change Webinar
Listening is an “act of surrender.” In listening to the people whose stories our organization aims to tell, we are making space to learn new information that may ultimately change our perceptions and work. In this ComNet Webinar, which is a great introduction to ethical visual storytelling, StoryCorps experts break down how we can use listening and narratives to tell rich and inclusive stories. They show examples of ethical storytelling and share practices that organizations can begin to integrate into their process.
2. Making Your Content More Human-Centered
Making your content “human-centered” means placing the needs, motivations, and concerns of your audience at the center of your content creation. When telling stories, often your audience’s own stories, it’s even more vital that you focus on being human-centered to ensure you are properly representing those who trusted you to share their experiences. Paul Sternberg, Director of Strategy and UX at Constructive, breaks down some of the questions you can ask yourself before, throughout, and after the content creation process to recenter on why and how your story serves your audience.
3. Getting Proper and Informed Consent
Many nonprofits serve communities that are historically underserved or marginalized. While it may be crucial to share some of these individuals’ lived experiences through your communications, it needs to be done with informed consent. Storytellers have a right to keep any aspects of their identity, story, image, and voice anonymous if they choose—without pressure or a lack of documentation. This example media consent form from Ethical Storytelling can be a great jumping-off point for your organization to create your own.
4. Interviewing Vulnerable Sources without Exploiting Them
Telling the story of your lived experience is inherently an extremely vulnerable experience, and nonprofit professionals who are interviewing community members will naturally hold a certain degree of power over interviewees. Many interviewees will not have prior experience working with journalists or communications professionals, and thus need to be guided through the process. They are trusting you to hold their best interest at heart. NPR offers a guide and toolkit to refer to when conducting your own interviews.
5. Ethical Storytelling Principles to Follow
There’s plenty to remember when trying to source, collect, and write stories with a focus on ethical storytelling, so a list of principles like this one from Voice of Witness makes a great resource to refer to. The principles center on how you can approach honoring your interviewee to create stories that not only move audiences but are built on respect. Those with lived experience are the experts, and we need to approach them with a trauma-informed strategy to erase bias.
6. Visual Ethical Storytelling Resources
Any accompanying visuals to your written stories need to follow many of the same principles. In a recent Constructively Curated, our Senior Designer Doug Knapton explored how we can incorporate ethical storytelling principles into our design—from avoiding vulnerability framing and moving towards solutions-oriented storytelling to finding inclusive imagery, making our content more web-accessible, and more.
7. Strengthening Every Aspect of Your Storytelling
Making your approach to storytelling more ethical or inclusive is only one aspect of writing a great story. As nonprofits, storytelling can be one of our best tools for advocacy and fundraising, so there’s still a lot to learn to ensure our stories are doing the best work possible to turn empathy into action. The Chronicle of Philanthropy recognizes this, so they compiled this large group of resources that are tailored to help your organization tell better stories all around.
More Constructively Curated
What exactly makes up a nonprofit’s brand experience? Well for membership driven organizations, the brand experience just may be the membership experience in itself. Starting from the moment audience members learn about you—and hopefully sign up to become a member of your community—they are experiencing your brand. And expectations rightfully may be high for the value that your organization will bring to them when they decide to become a member. Whether your organization has a paid membership model and membership network website, or simply gates content or other resources behind a login, you are making a promise to members that when they sign up, they will be offered value commensurate with their investment of time and money.
Offering meaningful membership programs of course starts at the content and experiences that you’re offering members, but it doesn’t end there. Offering meaningful member support, providing timely and transparent communications, and listening to and implementing member feedback will all help ensure that the promises you’re making are seen and realized. And choosing the right tools and technology to leverage is also key.
In this Constructively Curated newsletter, we’re going to explore some resources and tools to help member-driven nonprofits evaluate and design their member experience from start to finish utilizing the full power of strategy, communications, and technology.
1. Determine What Type of Network You’re Looking to Foster
Not all membership organizations are built the same, so not all membership organizations are looking to foster the exact same type of member network. There are three major types of networks—learning, action, and movement networks. Understanding what your organization is attempting to foster is not only strategically important for creating alignment between your nonprofit’s mission, vision, and financial model, but it is also a natural first step to building out a strong member experience that gives members exactly what they are looking for.
2. Member Journey Mapping
Each one of your members will walk through the journey designed by you to join your network, be oriented to membership, and continue to take full advantage of your offerings as a seasoned member. Defining this full journey takes time and intentionality. We need to determine at each step what we want members to feel and experience, what our touch points are, and if we are meeting expectations. This Fullstory resource walks through the ways to comprehensively map out your unique member journey to benefit both your organization and your members.
3. Welcoming Members with Thoughtful Communications
If you’ve ever signed up for a membership service just to receive no welcome or confirmation email, you know that it fills you with confusion. Sending welcome communications not only is an opportunity to begin the process of orienting members to everything they need to know about your network, but it is also a chance to get members excited. You can start delivering value right from your welcome. There are a wealth of different ways you can welcome members—like welcome letters or packets, spotlights of new members on your online community—and more.
4. Making a Strong First Impression
First impressions matter, and oftentimes, the first four weeks of membership set the tone for a member’s entire experience. This is the time when we need to lead new members and help them learn how they can integrate their membership into their daily lives. Members should feel welcomed but not overwhelmed, excited but not pressured, and rewarded for engagement rather than ignored. In this podcast episode, Membership Geeks introduces a five phase approach during the first four weeks to making a great impression.
5. Collecting Member Feedback
Bridging the gap between your organization’s understanding of your member journey and your member’s actual lived experiences is key to improving what you offer. And it requires us to do something simple but extremely helpful; collect membership feedback. Not only does member feedback give us information we can use to offer more value to our members, but it also signals to our members that we’re interested in hearing what they have to say. There are a few different ways we can consider collecting feedback, and some do’s ad dont’s to remember for success.
6. Leveraging an Engagement Platform for Your Membership Website
Building a membership website is far from simple or easy. Members often have a wide variety of needs that require complex features and functionality, and choosing the right technology is key to ensuring a positive member experience. This is where rather than starting from scratch you can leverage an engagement platform like Open Social. Open Social is a membership website tailored tool on which your organization can build a customizable member website—both ensuring a great experience for users and easy website management for your team.
7. The Evolved Membership Nonprofit: A Webinar to Explore
To create an amazing membership experience for your members, your organization’s larger membership model must be strong financially and strategically. There are a wealth of considerations to create and manage your organization’s business model successfully. In Nonprofit Financial’s Evolved Membership Nonprofit webinar, a panel of membership nonprofit experts convened to speak to the history of membership organizations, to show an example of an organization succeeding in the space right now, and to answer questions from nonprofit professionals.
More Constructively Curated
When you talk about burning fossil fuels, you could say that it produces one of two things: greenhouse gases or heat-trapping pollution. What’s the difference? “Heat-trapping pollution” speaks to both the cause (pollution) and the consequences (heat-trapping), while “greenhouse gases” feels more like a science vocabulary term—and the public responds accordingly.
In today’s political landscape, there’s a fine line between confusion, polarization, and mobilization. And on climate change, every message counts. The stories we share—in our writing, our images, and our design—have the power to change hearts and minds.
Thankfully, academics, organizers, and communicators have been advancing research that gets to the heart of the question: How do we change hearts and minds on the most pressing issues of our time? To help you share effective climate stories—stories that maximize engagement and minimize disaffection—we’ve compiled a list of resources nonprofits can use to understand which frames, messages, and images resonate best with the public.
1. The Right Words Are Crucial to Solving Climate Change
When it comes to climate change communications, some terms are polarizing, some are wonky, and others are downright confusing. This article outlines some of the most common polarizing or confusing climate phrases and offers alternatives. Take “restricting pollution”, which is unpopular with conservatives and swap in a solution that “innovates”; or look at “greenhouse gases” and swap in “heat-trapping pollution” to get to the heart of the problem. When we’re working to solve an issue as existential as climate change, mobilizing as many people as possible matters—and to do that, our words matter. You can use this resource to make sure you’re using the right words to mobilize on climate.
2. Research-backed Framing Tips
Researchers and scientists at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health deal with climate change—and its public health consequences—a lot. Together with science communication research experts, the team has put together a list of steps you can use to help you frame the climate crisis to maximize engagement and mobilization. From “frame climate as a public health issue” to advice on how to “get ahead of barriers” this article distills some of the best research into practical communications frames.
3. Examples of Effective Climate Framing for Nonprofits
Nonprofits play a key role in advancing solutions, mobilization, and knowledge on the climate crisis. That’s why I partnered with nonprofit communications specialist, MK Moore, to identify effective climate frames and examples that organizations can use to inspire their climate messaging. Together, we identified nine best practices for telling effective, ethical visual and verbal stories on climate and included examples of organizations that nail the best practices, which range from “leverage narrative storytelling” to “ethical storytelling” practices.
4. Communicating Climate Change Webinar
“Climate change has a branding problem,” is a bold statement, but thankfully, there are powerful solutions. In this insight, I break down the key learnings from Professor Melissa Aronczyk’s webinar on climate change communications. In the webinar, she shares “the three realities” of climate change: Climate change affects everything, climate change is something everybody needs to talk about, and climate change is very hard to talk about. Use the article or webinar to learn more about how to overcome the difficulties of communicating on climate change.
5. Examples of Climate Change Imagery
“Extreme weather” as opposed to climate change, can be a more effective motivator for mobilizing potential victims of extreme weather events to prepare for a crisis. This speaks to a larger phenomena: extreme weather is more palatable to climate skeptics than climate change. But how do we visually demonstrate extreme weather events? This article helps you utilize one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal for sharing the impact of climate change. In “How to Show Climate Change in Images,” you’ll find useful, practical tips for visually representing the climate crisis.
6. Seven Climate Visual Principles
In this article, “The Power of Imagery to Communicate the Urgency of Acting Now,” we get excellent tips on how our imagery can not just bring people on board for the realities of climate change, but how it can also spring people into action. Complete with seven climate visual principles, the resources explore the need to show real people, understand your audience, make it local, and more in order to spark action on climate.
7. Six Ways to Change Hearts and Minds about Climate Change
For organizers, the phrase “change hearts and minds” is almost cliche—but on climate, it’s one of our most effective levers for change. Changing hearts and minds means you’re getting skeptics to believe and act on climate. The Frameworks Institute is a think-tank dedicated to helping mission-driven organizations with research-backed communications strategies. On this page, they translate research into practice to share six tips to frame climate change to improve public understanding and inspire action.
More About Climate Stories
If you’re interested in seeing the learnings from these resources in action, explore our insight Effective Climate Communication Frames for Nonprofits & Examples That Inspire Action
As a designer, when I think about visualizing your brand’s values—be they inclusion, accessibility, respect, all of the above—one rule reigns supreme: Show, don’t tell. When we practice ethical storytelling in design and communications, we’re demonstrating an authentic commitment to our shared values by respecting the subjects of our stories.
Nonprofit communicators use storytelling to demonstrate their organization’s impact, commitments, and values, but oftentimes, the subjects of those stories aren’t professionals working at the nonprofit—rather, they’re the organization’s grantees or community members. When I get an email update from a nonprofit seeking to increase education equity, I’m not reading about the nonprofit staff, I’m reading about the students.
The way in which we share someone else’s story has real-world implications. Ethical storytelling addresses these implications, providing a framework for sharing others’ stories in a respectful, responsible, and effective manner. It focuses on elevating a subject’s lived experience, voice, and strengths to ensure that the story we tell about a person serves them—not just the storyteller. There’s been a lot of discussion about ethical storytelling in communications, but less about how it is applied in visual design.
There’s a hidden language in visual storytelling. The images and videos we use in our communication can radically alter how people will experience your story. Certain images instinctually hold positive and negative implications. And when we practice ethical storytelling in design, our communications and our design prioritize storytelling that’s authentic, respectful, and inclusive—storytelling that emulates our organizational values. In this article, I’ve gathered tools you can use to tell those values-based stories with your design.
Seven Resources for Practicing Ethical Storytelling in Design
Ethical Visual Storytelling for Nonprofit Brands
“In branding, you often get what you give: Respected brands are founded on respectful practices.” This insight provides an overview of ethical visual storytelling and a framework for applying the principles of ethical storytelling in visual stories. With seven criteria to consider when sharing visual stories—branding, imagery, videos—you can run through a checklist of questions to ask yourself to ensure you’re telling a visual story that empowers and emboldens your subjects. At the end, we hope you’ll gain an understanding of the building blocks for an authentic, respectful, optimistic, and culturally sensitive visual story.
Alternatives to Vulnerability Framing
Key to ethical storytelling in design is avoiding vulnerability framing. Vulnerability framing, as defined by the nonprofit research group FrameWorks Institute, defines people by their vulnerabilities. Vulnerability framing, “perpetuates stereotypes or weaknesses.” Some examples—showing thin children to advertise food aid—come to mind. This framing fails to consider the tenacity and resilience of stories’ subjects. In this episode on effective storytelling, FrameWorks Institute offers compelling, respectful alternatives to vulnerability framing.
Solutions-Oriented Framing
Optimism is a foundational element of ethical storytelling. If we’re not looking forward to something, what are we working toward? There’s a practical component to optimism in storytelling—motivating your audience—but more importantly, there’s a respect paid to the subjects when your stories show that you’re visualizing the fruit of their resiliency. That’s why FrameWorks Institute champions “solutions-oriented” framing, elevating desired outcomes over current crises. These are values and principles we can share of course in our communications, but also in the images we share.
Inclusive Images for Social Sector Communications
Like I said, there’s a hidden language in visual storytelling. And the images we use to share our brands are a fundamental part of the visual stories we tell. The Communications Network, a group that connects nonprofit communicators, recently hosted a webinar that explores inclusive imagery to help organizations emulate their values, avoid stereotyping and unconscious biases, and source diverse imagery and photography for their brands. It even goes as far as providing a framework for goal setting that can help you disrupt unconscious bias to prioritize inclusive imagery.
Activating Stereotypes with Brand Imagery: The Role of Viewer Political Identity
Learning—and unlearning—is key to improving our role as the gatekeepers of ethical storytelling in design. This article unpacks the fundamentals of the stereotypes we unconsciously activate with our brands. A key learning, for me, was the potential to perpetuate unjust biases in archetypes, not just stereotypes: “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.” The article explores the harmful stereotypes or archetypes in terms of a person’s age, race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, or religion.
The Dangers of Poverty Porn
“A photograph never lies about the photographer,” – retired photographer, Chester Higgins Jr.
“Poverty porn,” for those unfamiliar, is the use of exploitative images of people living in poverty to further the goals of the person or organization sharing the image. This article puts it perfectly when it says that the practice is “a master class in what not to do.” Poverty porn fails to elevate the strength and resiliency of people and instead centers a person’s deficits in order to meet the goals of the person or organization sharing the story. Of course, there’s a balance, and this article provides a great overview and framework for thinking about that balance. I especially loved Justin Forsyth’s, CEO of Save the Children UK, way of framing this: “Our image guidelines ensure all our communications reflect the truth, balancing the huge child suffering we witness with stories of hope and progress.”
Web Accessibility Initiative Images Tips and Tricks
Once you’ve done the work—and it is work—to ensure that your images are inclusive, don’t perpetuate biases, and elevate a person’s lived experiences, a key part of living up to your values in your design is ensuring that your assets are accessible to people with varying degrees of visual abilities or impairments. This web accessibility resource provides helpful tips and tricks for you and your team to assess the more technical side of inclusivity for your imagery, and if you use Figma to design, we’ve gathered plug-ins to help you advance inclusive design.
Closing Thoughts:
Ethical storytelling in design is an excellent way to “show” you value asset-framing, inclusivity, diversity, accessibility, and more. If you’re interested in exploring your brand and the stories you tell in your design, reach out to us to learn more about how we can build a brand that’s authentic, optimistic, and respectful.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely older than Giving Tuesday. The tradition is just 10 years old. In its 10 years though, the post-Thanksgiving holiday has taken the nonprofit world by storm. It’s largely regarded as the year’s biggest day of giving and even raked in more than $3.1 billion last year.
With any relatively new and widely adopted trend though, we think it’s important to take a step back. What are we actually trying to accomplish on Giving Tuesday?
Of course, there’s fundraising, marketing, and advocacy goals to consider. But how do we truly deepen someone’s engagement with our nonprofit brands on and beyond Giving Tuesday?
This giving season, we’re outlining seven steps you can take to stand out on Giving Tuesday by inviting deeper, lasting brand engagement with your nonprofit. Let’s dive in.
Seven Ways to Invite Deeper Engagement & Stand Out on Giving Tuesday
1. Provide Multiple Avenues for Engagement
If someone is seeing or receiving your Giving Tuesday content, that means they likely have some sort of shared interest with your nonprofit. Of course sharing an interest doesn’t directly translate to a donation. Expanding your Giving Tuesday strategy by inviting your audiences to sign petitions, volunteer, join conversations or phone banks can help deepen engagement with your nonprofit while giving someone an opportunity to feel a sense of stewardship toward your cause. To help create these avenues for engagement, we’ve found this resource on “future-proofing” volunteering and this article on strong petition writing helpful.
2. Draw a Clear Connection to Impact
In all of the noise around Giving Tuesday campaigns, drawing a clear connection between donors’ contributions and real-world impact is crucial. One tactic you could use is an impact calculator. An example we like is The Life You Can Save’s impact calculator. On this calculator, you can instantly see the real world impact your dollar can have on different issues. Of course, this won’t work for every nonprofit, but its virtues can be applied in your messaging and content to connect contributions and impact. You can check out some more ways to connect action to impact here. Making this connection clear can help you stand out on Giving Tuesday and strengthen your audience’s trust in your nonprofit.
3. Give a Face to Your Fundraising
There’s a saying in business that people buy from people. Of course, as nonprofits we’re not selling a product, but we are hoping to rally people around our mission to improve some corner of the world. In humanizing your content, you can connect with your audience on a personal level. Giving Tuesday marks a great time to elevate your staff, and we have resources on empowering them to embody your brand here. Of course, you can also highlight stories from the field, elevating both your audiences and your stakeholders to demonstrate your nonprofit’s community as well as the personal elements of your impact. Creating the space for a personal connection on Giving Tuesday can help you deepen your audience’s ties to your nonprofit.
4. Practice Asset Framing & Ethical Storytelling
If you do decide to elevate some of your stakeholders, it’s important to share stories in a way that respects their dignity (ethical storytelling) and emphasizes their fortitude (asset framing). When it comes to asset framing, which involves emphasizing strengths rather than deficits, we like The Communication Network’s guide on the subject. And for ethical storytelling, we have guides on both verbal and visual ethical storytelling. In the stories we tell, we often get what we give: Respected brands are founded on respectful practices. Asset framing and ethical storytelling keep respect—for subject, storyteller, and listener alike—at the center.
5. Provide Shareable Content
For your nonprofit’s most engaged fans, another avenue for engagement involves resharing content. To stand out on Giving Tuesday, your nonprofit can equip your most enthusiastic supporters with shareable content that articulates your nonprofit’s mission and vision. Cross pollination: linking to social posts in emails and vice versa, is one way you can achieve this. We have resources on building a community of engaged members here that can help—but you don’t have to limit this to your external audiences either. Empower your staff with the same tools (posts, copy and paste templates) and time if they want to elevate your nonprofit’s work on Giving Tuesday. You can even repost or reshare content from audiences and staff. When you do, you fuel a virtuous cycle of elevating and expanding your nonprofit’s important work.
6. Practice Financial Transparency
When someone trusts a nonprofit with their money, nonprofits can honor that trust with transparency. To stand out and deepen long-term engagement with your nonprofit on Giving Tuesday, you can use the day as an opportunity to showcase your nonprofit’s commitment to financial responsibility. Sharing key financial metrics, honest fundraising goals and results, and well as future financial plans can help you build or maintain trust from donors. Your transparency can also reinforce donors’ confidence in your organization and remind them of their alignment with your vision. Check out this resource on improving your nonprofit’s financial transparency.
7. Show Your Thanks
We’re nothing without our audiences. No matter their engagement, Giving Tuesday is a great time to show the people at the heart of your nonprofit—staff, stakeholders, and external audiences—your gratitude for them. This can take place on just about any medium you use to reach your audiences, and of course as the steward of your brand, you know the best way to reach them. If you decide to do letters or not, the principles in this resource on nonprofit thank you notes can help ensure that your audiences feel heard, appreciated, and thanked for their engagement on and beyond Giving Tuesday.
Closing Thoughts
Giving Tuesday, like any big day for your organization, represents a great opportunity to stand out and open the door to deeper, longer-lasting relationships. These seven tips can help, but at the heart of these and all your other communications efforts lies your mission and vision. Keeping who you are, what you do, why it matters at the heart of your work will open the door to authentic relationships between your organization and the people who fuel your impact. So this Giving Tuesday, we hope your nonprofit stands out for its authenticity and the doors you open for meaningful engagement.
More Constructively Curated
YOLO: You Only Launch Once.
When the time comes to launch your nonprofit’s new brand, you have a tremendous opportunity at hand. You have the chance to build buy-in from your base, drive engagement with your followers, and reach new audiences. Most importantly, you have a one-time opportunity to demonstrate that your new brand will amplify what really matters: the work your nonprofit is doing to make the world a better place.
While you’re working to wrap up your new brand or rebrand, you might be swamped. There’s legal to go through, letterheads to update—we’re with you (often, literally). But when it comes to making the time to thoughtfully invite engagement with your new brand, a Shakespeare quote comes to mind:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
If you’re getting ready to launch your nonprofit’s new brand, it might feel like you’re in a flood of to-dos. But because you only launch your new brand once, we’ve compiled eight tips and resources you can use to turn that flood into fortune for your nonprofit’s new brand.
Eight Tips on Launching Your Nonprofit’s New Brand
1. Write a Launch Announcement
Writing a launch announcement to publish on your website as a news item or press release is a great way to inform your audiences about your new brand. In a launch announcement, you can share what’s changed, why it’s changed, and importantly, what’s stayed the same. So, for example, a nonprofit might update its brand (logo, imagery, visual identity, and more) to better reflect its audiences. Of course, your nonprofit is likely still focused on your core issue area or cause, and you can re-emphasize that commitment to your audiences in your launch release. Your launch announcement can cover all of this plus what the process looked like behind the scenes. And if you need more inspiration, we’ve found a rebrand press release guide you can use.
2. Build a Social Media Template Bank
If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Building a bank of social media templates—a series of templates that you can use for the typical kinds of posts that your nonprofit shares—is an excellent tool for sharing your new brand and maintaining visual consistency across your social media. An advocacy nonprofit might want to build templates for petitions whereas an educational nonprofit might build templates for fun facts or tips. No matter your template plans, Canva and Figma are both excellent, collaborative tools for building this bank of templates. Both of these platforms will let you and your team share, copy, and collaborate on the templates that utilize your new brand.
3. Coordinate Social Media Posts
Announcing your new brand to build buy-in and deepen engagement requires cross-channel coordination. So, if you’re writing a blog, publishing a series of Instagram stories, and sharing a launch announcement on Facebook, you should make sure you coordinate the publication of these posts so that no one group of followers is left behind while other groups learn about your rebrand. Content publishers like Hootsuite, Sprout, or Sprinklr are excellent tools for scheduling and coordinating across channels so you can make sure your announcement is shared with your followers in every stream.
4. Update Your Social Media Profiles
A new brand means it’s time to update your social media profiles. We’ve found it best to start this process by making a checklist of all of the assets that will need to be re-made or updated. You can scan your various social media channels—from your email profile photo and your LinkedIn banner to your Instagram buckets and everything in between—and catalog all that will need to be redesigned. Canva, Figma, or Photoshop can be useful here, and you can use this helpful sizing guide to make sure your assets fit each platform. Then, once you’ve made all of the updated assets you need to build brand cohesion across channels, you can even time the updates to go live with your rebrand announcement.
5. Refresh Your Instagram Feed
If your nonprofit organization has an Instagram account, its profile likely has all of the markings of your old brand. One way to bring your new brand to life on your Instagram is to publish 9-12 new Instagram posts that feature your new visual identity. These pieces of content can start with a series announcing your rebrand, and from there, you can post as you normally would—only this time around, you can use your newly branded social media templates (see tip No. 2) for your posts. Posting 9-12 new posts will help make sure your profile reflects the new you, and you can use an Instagram Planner to help make sure that your audience is engaging with your new but cohesive brand.
6. Send an Email Newsletter Update
To make sure that you’re reaching audiences that might not engage with your social media, sharing an email newsletter announcing your rebrand will help ensure that your entire base knows about the new you. A visually rich newsletter that shows off your new brand, walks your audience through the transformation, and invites them to engage with your visual identity will help make sure that all of your stakeholders know who that new icon in their inbox belongs to. If you’re already using an email marketing platform like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, you can make sure you’ve updated your profile there (see tip No. 4), and then share the new you with your list.
7. Post a Blog or Article
A blog or a long-form article that takes a more editorial approach to your launch announcement is an excellent way to build buy-in and deepen engagement with your nonprofit’s new brand. For a long-time follower of your nonprofit who’s interested in what happened behind the scenes or what inspired the change, a blog can serve as a vehicle for communicating those changes. It can also help you communicate the constants, giving you the space to re-emphasize your commitment to your work—and how your new brand can even help strengthen that work and amplify your impact. Constructive CEO Matt Schwartz wrote a blog on one of our own brand’s changes (for us, it was adding a higher purpose), which might be a helpful example of articulating a shift in your brand.
8. Invite and Track Engagement
Though it might be obvious, it’s too important to leave out: When you’re sharing your new nonprofit brand, you should both invite and track engagement across channels. While you might not want to publish a post soliciting design feedback, you may want to invite your audience to reach out to your team with any questions. Also, it’s important not to let all of your marketing efforts be spent in vain. You can use a new or familiar marketing CRM platform (Hootsuite, Hubspot, Mailchimp, or social media platforms themselves) to track engagement with your brand announcement in service of understanding your audience’s reaction to your nonprofit’s new brand.
