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.
Your nonprofit brand is so much more than your logo or your marketing materials. Your brand is an idea that lives in the mind of your audience, and that idea is defined by how your members experience, engage with, and remember your organization.
For membership nonprofits, understanding your members’ experience can both serve as a bellwether and a blueprint for the direction of your nonprofit brand.
Membership surveys, whether they’re conducted annually, ahead of rebrand, or following an initiative, play a critical role in providing nonprofit communicators with the insights they need to guide their brand and amplify their impact. We’ve compiled a list of resources and tips you can use to build a nonprofit member survey to gain meaningful insights into the experience of the people who make up your organization.
List of Resources and Tips for Your Nonprofit Membership Survey
1. Set Survey Goals and Objectives
A strong nonprofit member survey starts with clearly defined goals and objectives. You can begin by defining the scope of your survey: Do you want general member feedback (an annual survey) or input on something specific, like a new initiative? From there, you can set your primary goal: What do you hope to learn from a member survey? Next, you can set some more specific objectives. For example, a primary goal could be to understand why volunteering is low and an objective could be to understand why a volunteer’s onboarding experience made them volunteer again. Learn more about setting survey goals and objectives here.
2. Engage Your Community in the Survey Creation
Inviting feedback and ideas from stakeholders, select members, and teams across your nonprofit will help make sure your survey includes all the critical questions necessary for understanding your members’ experience. A brand built democratically—with inclusive communications—is a brand built to last. And surveys are no exception. A diverse range of perspectives and ideas can strengthen any survey, and in turn, the survey can strengthen the strategic decisions regarding your nonprofit brand. This can be as simple as sending your survey around in a google doc, but it could also be a brainstorm with your team, which we have tips for here.
3. Use Ethical Nonprofit Member Survey Best Practices
To build an ethical nonprofit member survey, you can open by communicating to your base: the purpose of your survey; the voluntary nature of the survey; the efforts you and your team are taking to maintain member privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity; and how you intend to use the survey results or share any findings with members. You can even leave room for your survey participants to express how they feel about the survey itself. Check out some best practices for writing unbiased questions as well as other considerations you can make to build a survey that reflects your organization’s commitment to its members.
4. Research New Questions to Include
Finding inspiration for new questions that will help you better understand your members’ experience is especially useful if you’re sending out an annual survey. While you’ll likely already review last year’s questions and search for new ones (and we’ve found a helpful list for new ones here), your research can also come from the members themselves. Think about member trends that you’ve noticed and consider whether or not they’re worth exploring in your survey. For example, did your base love one campaign but not really respond to another? You can use your member survey to better understand their motivations for these and any other noteworthy trends.
5. Write Questions Concisely and Aim for Clarity
When we make nonprofit member surveys accessible, palatable, and comprehensible to all of our members, we can elevate the voices that might otherwise get lost on the margins. Clear, concise questions that avoid jargon or technical terms can mitigate the confusion that leads to drop offs mid-survey. Limiting the number of questions to around 10-30 questions will also help prevent survey fatigue. You can try putting yourself in the shoes of a brand new member who’s opening this survey between childcare or meetings—where would you close the browser when it’s crunch time? Maximizing nonprofit member survey participation leads to a more accurate, holistic picture of your members’ experience.
6. Pick a Survey Tool that Works for You
From Google Forms to Survey Monkey, there are plenty of survey tools out there. You can check out a list of options here, but it will all depend on your nonprofit’s needs, budget, and survey size. Some other considerations you could weigh are: the platform’s security, the user interface, customization, and the granularity of analytics provided. Even if you have a platform that works for you, it might be worth periodically exploring other options to see if there are any features that might improve your nonprofit member survey. Of course, as the saying goes: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If your nonprofit has been using a platform that works for you, then there’s no need to switch.
7. Try Segmenting Members
Member segmentation is especially useful for larger nonprofits with diverse programming and several channels for engagement. Tailoring questions leads to targeted feedback. When you’re building your member survey, you can consider segmenting based on how they’ve engaged with your nonprofit—did they volunteer, donate, phone bank, or sign a petition? You can also segment based on things like location, length of membership, and more. Segmenting will help you identify and understand whether or not a trend is isolated to a certain group of members, it lets you address members’ unique needs and interests, and it can ultimately help inform strategic decisions for your nonprofit brand.
8. Make an Action Plan for Results
Once the hard work of building your nonprofit member survey is over, you get to move onto the fun part: Making a plan based on your members’ experience! Of course, you’ll probably do the basics: analyzing results and identifying challenges, opportunities, and trends. And from there, you can share findings with staff, members, volunteers, and other stakeholders to be true to your team’s transparency commitments. Then, you get to the heart of it all: How can your survey findings help shape your nonprofit brand? A brand, after all, is shaped by your members’ experience and defined by how they remember your nonprofit. You can check out some resources for strengthening your members’ experience here.
Closing Thoughts:
Member surveys are vital windows into the everyday experience of your nonprofit’s base. With a clear, concise, ethical and unbiased survey, you can open up your (metaphorical) office door to hear the thoughts, ideas, and feelings from everyone who identifies with your nonprofit’s mission. And a member survey doesn’t need to be one-and-done; strong brands start conversations—they don’t just ask questions. If you continue being curious about your members’ experience, you’re on the road to building a meaningful member experience that lets you amplify your impact together.
A strong brand has the incredible power to change minds, build movements, and transform lives. When we think about our nonprofit brands, we usually consider their relationship to our external audiences. But brands are really built from the inside-out. If you create team-brand alignment, your team can authentically embody and project your organization’s brand to the world.
If you were building a house, you’d start with the foundation. And when you’re building a strong brand, you can start by aligning your team’s everyday experiences with what’s expressed to your external audiences.
After all, our teammates are our greatest assets and brand ambassadors. They sit at the heart of our organizations and our impact. When we turn our gaze inward, we can give our teammates confidence that the brand they present to the world is true to the one they experience. In this Constructively Curated, we’re exploring six ways to create a stronger brand by aligning your team’s experience with your external brand.
6 Ways to Build a Strong Brand Through Your Team
1. Build Your Brand Strategy Democratically
Building your brand strategy helps you answer the big three in our books: who you are, what you do, and why it matters. Our organizations are stronger when our teammates feel aligned around the answer to those three questions. To build that alignment, we can build our brand strategy democratically, incorporating voices and lived experiences from every corner of our organizations. We’ve gathered resources for inclusive brainstorms and workshops to boost engagement. You can also try out some of our favorite brand strategy exercises. And once you weave together ideas through an inclusive, democratic process, you empower your team to feel alignment and ownership toward your external brand.
2. Create a Focused Mission Statement
A clear, concise mission statement that reflects your nonprofit’s core purpose and values is essential to creating team-brand alignment. Nonprofits can create that focused mission through inclusive strategic planning and through those brand strategy exercises. If your team understands and feels ownership over your nonprofit’s mission, they’ll be able to honestly reflect that mission to your external audiences.
3. Give Your Team Hands-On Opportunities
It’s easy to get caught up in the everyday responsibilities of our roles—to lose sight of the tangible, powerful impact of nonprofit work. Providing your team with hands-on opportunities to work in your issue area bridges the gap between a typical work day and your atypical impact. Hands-on opportunities can take a different form for every nonprofit. Political nonprofits could provide teammates with canvassing opportunities, or environmental nonprofits could sponsor park or beach clean ups. And if those don’t apply, you can check out other team volunteer ideas here. The opportunities are variable, but the result is uniform: When you empower your team to live out your nonprofit’s mission, you build cohesion between their experience and the brand they project.
4. Stick to DEI Commitments
Brands that democratically iterate and improve upon their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion create a virtuous authentic brand cycle. When policies that promote inclusivity and psychological safety are integral to your organization, you empower your team to bring their true selves to work. Authentic brands are built when team members from across your organization feel safe to honestly present themselves and to authentically embody your organization’s values. If you’re looking to build on your DEI commitments, you can check out some of The Communications Network’s DEI resources for nonprofits.
5. Practice Transparency and Accountability
Strong nonprofit brands cultivate internal and external trust in their integrity. Making sure members of your nonprofit team feel that leadership is honest, transparent, and exercising integrity is a key piece of building team-brand alignment. More and more employees want to feel that their employers are committed to doing good in the world. It’s part of why nonprofit hiring is booming. To preserve your team’s enthusiasm and goodwill, nonprofits can engage from the inside, create communication channels to keep employees informed, and encourage open dialogue by providing opportunities to ask questions, give feedback, and contribute to decision-making processes.
6. Foster Belonging and Community
Creating a sense of community and belonging is an essential element of bridging alignment between your team and your nonprofit brand. And that sense of community doesn’t have to stay siloed across departments or teams, either! Your team can bond over everything from funny pet photos to shouting out fellow employees. At Constructive, we have a #Cute-Animals Slack channel, and we use Bonusly to give recognition to our teammates—but there are plenty of other employee recognition platforms out there. Fostering community engagement helps make sure that your teammates know they belong—and in time, that sense of belonging strengthens the connection between their perception of your nonprofit brand and the lived experience of your team.
Closing Thoughts
At the end of the day, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. A nonprofit brand represents the organization and its people, and building team-brand alignment between your team’s experience and your brand is an ongoing process. These resources are just six of many steps you can take to strengthen your brand by empowering your greatest brand ambassadors—your team—to authentically embody your brand.
– Your Friends at Constructive
More Constructively Curated
Our best ideas come to light when we feel safe, supported, and free to express ourselves—when we feel like we belong. In fact, research shows that creating a psychologically safe environment is a key to unlocking your team’s creative potential. So when we build a brainstorm, we should try to create an environment where everyone is supported, included, and heard. And here at Constructive, building an inclusive remote brainstorm has become a part of our day-to-day lives.
Of course, every brainstorm or creative workshop has its hurdles—for example, did you know that in the average 6-person meeting, just two people do more than 60% of the talking? Traditional brainstorms don’t always offer a level playing field for people who are visual learners, people who are more introverted or junior on a team, or people from marginalized communities.
An inclusive, encouraging environment makes our brainstorms a safe space where everyone’s ideas can shine. Our collective thinking is elevated and the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. We’ve gathered some of our favorite tips, techniques, and tools you can use to build an inclusive remote brainstorm. We hope they help you empower your team and unlock your nonprofit’s creative potential!
10 Tips, Techniques, and Tools for an Inclusive Remote Brainstorm
1. Provide Preparation
Some people are better at improvising than others. If you’re looking to maximize participation and boost your team’s confidence, consider sending an agenda, prompt, or any other relevant materials in advance. Some brainstorms are problem-oriented—you and your team are looking to solve a specific set of problems. Others are more creativity-focused with your team focusing on ideating for marketing, communications, and more. Either way, giving your team the time to ideate before brainstorms will reap better solutions and ideas. More importantly, you’re making sure that everyone has a better chance to contribute, regardless of their thinking speed or communication style.
2. Create a Sense of Belonging
Everyone on your team belongs there, and they should feel free to express their thoughts, opinions, and individuality. Now, how do you make sure that everyone feels that way in a setting where ideas and topics are moving quickly? We’ve found that opening with a reminder of your team’s cultural commitments—like inclusivity and equity, for example—can be a great starting point. And, of course, you should stay true to those commitments throughout the session. An inclusive brainstorm can also create the space for personal storytelling or opting out of conversations. Creating a sense of belonging means that everyone understands that they add valuable perspective.
3. Encourage Equal Airtime
A key part of running an inclusive remote brainstorm is making sure that everyone feels empowered to contribute. No one or two people should dominate the brainstorm. One way to get everyone involved is to rotate facilitation roles throughout the session. And since some brainstorming sessions often call for timed responses, using a timer to hold your team accountable can help. If you want to kick that up a notch, there’s even a video meeting host called Vowel, which shows the percentage of airtime each participant has spent speaking. You can also practice a technique, like round-robin (see below) to maintain equal airtime.
4. Try the Round-Robin Technique
A round-robin brainstorm involves full team participation and encourages creativity through lateral iterations. You can facilitate a round-robin brainstorm verbally or in a written format, but it starts with each participant independently creating an idea. From there, it goes a little like this: Participant A shares an idea. Then, every other participant builds off of Participant A’s idea, adding their own. Next, Participant B shares an idea. Everyone adds on again—and the cycle continues. After each participant has had the chance to share their ideas and receive add-on ideas, your team can open up and review each of the ideas and sub-ideas worth exploring—and you’ll do so knowing that everyone had a chance to contribute their unique perspective!
5. Practice Brainwriting
Brainwriting is a great brainstorming technique that supports participation from all participants, no matter their seniority or their level of comfort with speaking in groups. Brainwriting is a technique that also supports participants who aren’t strong improvisers since it gives everyone time to ideate before people start sharing ideas. Then, after everyone ideates, the ideas are then shared and discussed during the actual brainstorming session. This method ensures that all ideas are given equal consideration and lets more introverted participants contribute without feeling overwhelmed.
6. Try Mind Mapping
For visual learners, mind mapping is a great technique that helps participants organize and connect ideas. A mind map starts with a central idea, and as participants share new ideas, they’re added as branches off of the central idea. New ideas can either be added as new branches or sub-branches. Remote brainstorming sessions can utilize digital mind mapping tools (we like Miro or Mural) that let participants contribute and collaborate in real time.
7. Use the Lotus Blossom Technique
The Lotus Blossom technique is a structured brainstorming method that expands on initial ideas by creating clusters and sub-clusters. This technique works well as a one-person brainstorm or in a small group because it forces participants to work within some constraints and to zoom in on the most important issues instead of thinking expansively. Lotus Blossom is another great technique for visual learners.
8. Utilize Digital Whiteboards
A lot of our ideation here at Constructive involves digital white boarding. These tools are essential for remote brainstorms and workshops, and they help support the techniques we’ve discussed. Popular digital whiteboards include Miro, Mural, and ClickUp—but shop around and find out what works best for your team. Digital whiteboards make brainstorms more inclusive not just because they support remote brainstorms, but because they support some of the techniques designed to support visual learners, junior staff, or introverted colleagues.
9. Share Interactive Polls
To build inclusive remote brainstorms, we have to think about ways to proactively encourage our teammates who might be nervous to air an opinion or feel like an opinion might not be completely valid (though it surely is!). Polls or interactive surveys during a remote brainstorm let you and your team gather feedback, prioritize ideas, gauge preferences—and it can be anonymous. Plus, interactive polls add an element of interactivity to the session, fostering inclusivity. Two of our favorites are Slido and the native polling feature in Zoom.
10. Don’t Forget to Take Breaks!
It may sound simple, but in an hour or hours-long remote brainstorming session where everyone is giving it their all, it’s easy to burn people out. Regular breaks that you commit and stick to create the necessary space for people to recharge, reflect, and process the ideas shared. They also foster a spirit of inclusivity at brainstorms, because in the nonprofit space, we’re often looking to solve difficult, daunting problems. Carving out time for people to process and understand that they might need to sit something out is critical for creating an environment where your teammates feel safe and supported.
More Constructively Curated
When you open a book, you have the potential to improve your life—reduce stress, strengthen memory, sleep better—but when you work in the social impact space, your reading has the potential to improve lives all around you. Nonprofit communications books and nonprofit branding books can change the way you connect with audiences, colleagues, and constituents.
Picking up a new book can be one of the most humbling, empathy-bridging experiences. Without leaving our front doors, we can travel oceans, visit ancestors, experience life in another’s shoes. And we can do this all in service of improving our roles as catalysts for social change.
The team at Constructive has gathered eight of our favorite all-time books for people looking to amplify their social impact or nonprofit communications. The books have broadened our perspectives and made us better storytellers. Above all, they’ve changed the way we see the world and understand our place in it. We hope they bring you the same fulfillment!
Engine of Impact by William F. Meehan III and Kim Starkey Jonker
Engine of Impact was written for dissatisfied doers. We all work in the nonprofit space to drive positive social change. Whether that’s in healthcare, education, or the environment, we’re here because we’re not satisfied with the status quo. If you want to continue building up engines for social change and amplify their impact, Engine of Impact was written for you. Drawing on decades of research, lived experience, and classroom teachings, the book creates a clear roadmap for cultivating high-achieving, high-impact social impact organizations. The powerful ideas behind Engine of Impact make it a must-read for any leader in the nonprofit space.
Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds revolves around the simple but inevitable truth that change is constant. The book explores self-help, society-help, and planet-help as tools for shaping the lives we want to lead. Adrienne Maree Brown’s book invites readers to, “feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us,” in order to understand and influence change. Published in 2017, the book serves as a guide for people in the social change space interested in intersectional solutions to society’s problems. Emergent Strategy blends careful philosophical examination with practical, powerful suggestions for facilitating social change.
The Brand IDEA by Nathalie Laidler-Kylander and Julia Shepard Stenzel
IDEA in The Brand IDEA: Managing Nonprofit Brands with Integrity, Democracy, and Affinity stands for Integrity, Democracy, and Affinity. The book offers insight for those looking to shed dated for-profit practices. Gone are the days of smoke and mirrors, secret board meetings, foggy finances. Social impact organizations are leading the charge, transforming the ways we work with participatory processes and partnerships. Successful workplaces are also tethered by a shared mission and shared values. The Brand IDEA explores how nonprofit leaders can understand the value of social impact brands, and how to cultivate them within a framework that reflects their values.
Blind Spot by Teju Cole
With breathtaking photography and evocative prose, Teju Cole’s Blind Spot lives at the intersection of lived experience and visual memory. Cole chronicles the beginning of his vision’s deterioration in this multimedia book that follows the author’s travels from Berlin to Brooklyn. In Blind Spot, Cole plays with perspective, inviting readers to join him in seeing magic in the mundane. More reflective than pragmatic, the book is an excellent meditation for communicators seeking to broaden their perspective and see the world through another’s creative lens.
Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Polarization might be the defining problem of our political era. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Russell Hochschild immerses herself in the community of Lake Charles, Louisiana to explore the importance of emotion in politics. Although toxic environmental pollution has destroyed livelihoods and lives around Lake Charles, the solutions are stymied by disagreement. When people resist help, it can be easy to leave them behind. However, Hochschild encourages readers to take trips over the “empathy wall” as a first step toward understanding and caring for people.
Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits by Debbie Millman
Is branding brainwashing, or is it simply a differentiator? Can a person be a brand? Is the word “brand” itself overused? In Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits, Debbie Millman takes the public discourse around branding “to the stratospheric level.” Interviewing some of the brightest marketing minds of our time, Millman explores what’s in a brand. The book considers the role brands play in society, technology, politics, economics, and psychology to help understand what makes people align with a sign, symbol, or movement.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The more we understand our world, the better we’ll be at designing products, services, and experiences that are kinder, more impactful, and fueled by empathy. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essays on ecology remind us of the hidden super-connectedness of the natural world and our place within it. They also beautifully weave Indigenous wisdom and nature together in stories that are captivating and inspiring. The book serves as a meditation on the rich braid of reflections and experiences that shape our perception.
Facilitating Breakthrough by Adam Kahane
As cooperation across organizations, sectors, and continents expands, rallying people around a common goal gets complicated. Of course, you could drive alignment through the traditional top-down approach—sending requests, monitoring progress. There’s also the horizontal approach, letting people accompany change from the passenger seat. Or, you could practice something new: transformative facilitation, which cycles back and forth between vertical and horizontal approaches to empower and connect participants. Facilitating Breakthrough transcends sectors to help any organizer or leader practice transformative facilitation in order to break through barriers and drive change.
More on Nonprofit Branding
Interested in learning more about building up your nonprofit brand? Reach out to us or check out some of our favorite pieces on building up your nonprofit brand.
Try to picture greenhouse gases. What comes to mind? Do you see lines of cars on the freeway, smoke stacks, power plants, oil rigs—all of the above? This Earth Month, we’re thinking about a different emitter: websites.
Organizations need websites. They’re often the first place people go to learn about an organization and the epicenter of your digital ecosystem—kind of an “all roads lead to Rome” in communications. But what if Rome needs a little cleaning up?
The average web page generates approximately 0.5 grams of CO2 per pageview. Digital technologies on the whole account for about 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In our day-to-day lives, we know how to make greener decisions, such as recycling or shopping sustainably. However, when it comes to our websites, the solutions aren’t so clear. In this resource roundup, we’ve compiled steps you can take to make your website a little more eco-friendly.
The Green Web Foundation has a goal of making the internet fossil fuel free by 2030, and lucky for us, they’ve built out a directory of hosts that use green energy to power websites. While the list is a great starting point, we recommend doing research to make sure that the host you pursue has climate goals that are as ambitious as those of your organization.
The basic principle for a more eco-friendly website is: If you want to build greener, build leaner. Optimizing your images is a simple way to make sure that the files on your website are leaner—plus, your site will load faster. Explore plug-ins for WordPress sites, Squarespace, and other best practices.
In line with the “leaner means greener” theme, it’s time to talk about lazy loading. This technique delays the loading of “non-critical” resources on your page. So, if something is off-screen for a viewer (a video sits at the bottom of your page, for example), lazy loading won’t load the content until the viewer scrolls there. This simple technique lowers your website’s payload and load time, making it greener and more efficient.
Several sustainable web platforms are only good for greenwashing. Not Patch. Patch is a platform that keeps its promise to reduce emissions. The company works to calculate an organization’s carbon footprint, and then systematically compensates by advancing carbon removal projects. They’ve even helped change the way e-commerce companies offset their carbon.
Unfortunately, most power sources today are still carbon-intensive. CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that gives organizations the power to perform the same work online with less energy. They boost efficiency by standardizing their servers with a network of similar machines, run on the same code and hardware. TL;DR: CloudFlare’s standardized computing is less energy intensive.
Think of this like digital spring cleaning. Even content that’s rarely viewed—like old blog posts—requires enery to store, serve, and back up. And this translates to CO2 emissions. By archiving, pruning, or deleting these low-value pages, you can streamline your site’s footprint and contribute to a lower-carbon web. Watch this webinar with Gerry McGovern to learn more about reducing digital waste.
Sustainable web practices, like everything online, are evolving. Right now, cutting edge industry solutions involve carbon removal and sequestration, but we don’t know what tomorrow holds. If you’re interested in keeping up with green web practices through podcasts, articles, books, or online communities, we recommend checking out Green the Web.
Closing Thoughts
Sure, we spend lots of our time online, but we spend all of that time on Earth! As stewards of the internet, we can all play a crucial role in transitioning to cleaner, greener web practices. And even if you’re not ready to implement any of these steps just yet, you can always consider out-of-the-box ways to stay sustainable online. Maybe for you, that means more minimalist design or embedding your site’s videos. Any step—and every step—makes a difference. We hope these resources help!
– Your Friends at Constructive
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 or 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 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 touchpoints are, and if we are meeting expectations. This Fullstory resource walks through 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 and don’ts 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.
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
Website animation has a bit of a reputation: eye-catching and trendy, it’s become a subtle and not-so-subtle staple in designer toolkits. Animated videos with a friendly style and menus that spring in and out of view have become common features of websites of all kinds. But if we take a step away from radiating icons and motion graphics, animation is a tool that–when used correctly–enhances the user experience and connects with your audience.
Motion and interactivity can transform the sea of text and images that greet visitors to most websites into a journey that nudges them gently towards areas of interest. Features like color changes over time can indicate where a user has been while subtle motion can incite curiosity in parts of the screen that they may have otherwise been ignored. By using well-placed animation to guide audiences through your site, you illuminate what you value by creating a memorable experience that amplifies rather than distracts from your message.
Though designers and web developers come to mind when we talk animation, it can and should be explored by anyone. After all, there are a number of animations to choose from, and considerations like accessibility, personality, and style will go into what’s right for your organization. So, whether you’re looking to experiment or diving into more advanced work, we hope this series of curated resources and tools sets you on your path!
-Your Friends at Constructive
In this primer by our team, learn exactly what we mean when we talk about web animation through the lens of human perception, audience engagement, and how different types of animation can enhance the user experience.
When you’re ready to grab your audience’s attention (but not distract them!), the Nielsen Norman Group lays out a series of best practices for animation and outlines how even simple animations like progress bars and color changes for text create feedback loops with your audience.
Material Design by Google is a clean, easy to understand resource that explains various aspects of user interface design including animation. This guideline article on Motion explains the different types of animation and motions you can use to express your brand’s personality.
So we know what to do with animation, but what about what not to do? This piece featured in the UX Collective describes how the overuse of animation can negatively affect a user’s experience while highlighting some design considerations.
And we can’t forget about video animation. Though they’re often labeled as just entertainment, they can help nonprofits specifically by sharing your message in a consistent and engaging way on your website, across social media, and more.
Ready to incorporate animation into your work? Animate.css is a varied but streamlined CSS animation pattern library that can help communicate between designers and developers how elements on your site should animate.
If you’re looking for something a little more advanced, check out the Anima Youtube channel! Explore dozens of tutorials and bring your animations to life.
More Constructively Curated
• 7 Resources to Embody Your Brand Values with Digital Accessibility
• Transparency and Your Project’s Success: 5 Resources
• 6 Resources to Turn Your Strategic Plan into Design
At first glance, website accessibility issues like contrast ratios, keyboard functionality, hover states, and other areas of web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) compliance may feel overly technical and in the weeds. But digital accessibility goes far beyond how a website looks and functions—it’s also a tangible demonstration of your organization’s values and essential to maximizing visibility, reach, and impact. Because, if equity and empathy are important to your brand, it’s hard to demonstrate this if your website isn’t usable by the very people you want to engage or stand with.
For your brand to resonate with audiences, your digital presence should be fully aligned with the values you want to embody. So, rather than looking at WCAG 2.1 guidelines as technical jargon, a legal box to check off, or an added expense in your website redesign, remember that designing for accessibility is about how you show up in the world. After all, your website is probably the most visible ambassador for your brand.
As the lead of Constructive’s engineering team, making sure that we write clean, performant code—all that technical jargon—is a big part of what I do. But our work is always centered on what the experiences we create say about the organizations that we work with and how they engage audiences online. So, whether you’re a nonprofit communications manager with little technical background or an experienced developer, here are some resources that the team and I curated to demystify digital accessibility and deepen your understanding and appreciation of how it can make a difference for your organization.
Before covering the best ways to improve digital accessibility, it’s good to start with a primer (or refresher!) on the topic. In documenting their design system, the US Government does an excellent job explaining the fundamentals.
Everybody loves quick wins! Here, developer Phiter Fernandez outlines a few simple and important ways to implement accessibility features, alt text, labels input fields, and more.
Websites are often loaded with images—and they play a crucial part in telling a story. Alt text is an often overlooked part of ensuring that they’re available to everyone, not just sighted users. While time consuming to create for a full website, alt text greatly improves the user experience—and search engine optimization.
It’s easy to forget that not everyone uses a mouse or trackpad to browse online. Here’s a great overview of the keyboard browsing experience, explaining its importance and the specifics with a focus on designing for people with mobility issues, one hand, no hands, or even those who just have modified keyboards.
Accessibility is also important when choosing brand color systems—way before a website is even coded. Una Kravets from Google Chrome Developers breaks down the importance of color contrast and demystifies the color standards required for WCAG A, AA, and AAA compliance
Though backend choices may seem invisible on the frontend, they directly impact your site’s functionality. Deeper into the technical weeds, this guide teaches accessibility concepts at the code level and provides standard keystrokes to optimize the keyboard testing process.
Dedicated to digital accessibility for all, longstanding independent group A11Y is one of the best resources for everything from books and podcasts to conferences and meetups in the accessibility design space—both for beginners and dedicated experts.
More Constructively Curated
• Transparency and Your Project’s Success: 5 Resources
• 6 Resources to Turn Your Strategic Plan into Design
• Adopting Digital Design Systems to Strengthen Your Nonprofit’s Brand: 8 Resources
Digital projects like branding and web design involve a number of moving parts. From engaging board members to reviewing design work to relaying website needs, the process can be winding, mystifying, and overwhelming to manage across teams and disciplines. With collaboration growing increasingly online, figuring out how to communicate effectively and who to build relationships with to undertake this work can be just as important, if not more important than the work itself.
When organizations consider acquiring an agency partner–whether that’s through direct solicitation or an RFP–these considerations invariably become top of mind, especially when projects veer into expertise that your organization may know less about, i.e. coding or developing messaging. Ideally, your partner would meet these needs and gaps with transparency and openness to guide internal and external teams to the finish line, establish check-ins and checkpoints, and illuminate not only what you need to know to feel secure in this collaboration but also how to bring you into the project without trapping you in the weeds.
That transparency, centering of relationships, and accountability are core tenets of how we approach every project with our clients here at Constructive. Without that open communication and collaboration, it’s impossible to maintain a partnership where we both learn, grow, and deliver the best possible product and experience.
As you continue to think about the type of agency partner that you need for your own projects or consider managing your own projects internally, we’ve gathered a list of resources below of best practices to facilitate these processes. We hope you find them helpful no matter where you are in your process!
Inherently collaborative and unique, the execution of digital projects relies on sincere relationships and discovering the best possible way to work together. In Project Management for Humans, Brett Harned outlines how anyone–-from designer to managers–can understand how digital projects are run and how to collaborate effectively beyond tools and templates.
Projects are a juggling act between time, scope, and budget. If a feature needs to be added, that calls for more time and more budget. If time needs to be reduced, then so does the scope. As projects inevitably change over the course of their process, DPM explores the relationships between these areas and how other parameters like benefit and risk can impact the evolution of a project.
Though scheduling, time management, and leadership are key skills to delivering projects from start to finish, the most important is communication. This article from Northeastern University discusses how communication can be leveraged during projects, why inclusive language matters, and how the effective transference of information can create a smooth experience for organizations and agencies alike.
With large cross-team collaboration, a culture of accountability sets both an organization and agency partner up for success. Twproject highlights the core components of accountability and how they can be translated to action items teams can use to prevent problems before they start and effectively solve them should any arise.
The difference between good and bad feedback from clients to agencies can directly impact the overall success of a project. Our project managers examine how asking questions, communicating problems, consolidating feedback, and other practices can foster collaboration and keep teams strategically aligned.
More Constructively Curated
• 6 Resources to Turn Your Strategic Plan into Design
• Adopting Digital Design Systems to Strengthen Your Nonprofit’s Brand: 8 Resources
• 7 Resources to Help You Understand and Reduce Your Nonprofit’s Technical Debt
