Strategic plans steer the journey that a nonprofit will take over a number of years. The allocation of resources, the scaffolding of programs both new and old, and the core values that drive your team as you connect with your community all rely on a meticulously crafted plan and process.
While programming, donations, and capacity building often stand at the forefront of these conversations, branding and design play a significant role in the secure and supply of resources for organizational growth and transformation. As nonprofits evaluate how to best serve their communities in the strategic planning process and how to reach beyond their established audience, several questions may come to mind.
Does your website position you as an authoritative leader or as an organization stuck in the past? Are your values translated into design elements like imagery, copy, and color palette? Is your content easy to find and understand for people to engage with?
Though these elements are often overlooked, they do the important work of solidifying who you are in the imagination of your audience and can determine the success of goals like increased donations, visibility of research, and overall engagement. The resources we’ve included below are meant to provide a starting point in thinking about how branding and good visual design can forge sincere audience relationships. We hope you find them useful as your work continues to evolve!
When you consider brand strategy during the execution of a strategic plan, you hone your mission and values into concrete ways to engage with your audience. Hubspot discusses how the core elements of brand strategy can help you intentionally tap into what resonates with your organization, employees, and audience to deliver an impactful brand experience.
Design is a sensory experience and, for many, vision is the sense in question. This article demonstrates how color palette, website, and other elements of identity can determine how memorable your organization will be in the minds of those you’re trying to reach.
A nonprofit’s website plays a pivotal role in driving audience engagement and establishing initial interest with site visitors. Our Founder and Executive Director Matt Schwartz accentuates how credibility, proximity, and impact are determined through website design, and how the right UX choices can directly correlate to an interest in donations, research engagement, exploration, and more.
High quality imagery and sleek UX are only one iteration of visual design. In addition to aesthetics, visual design can be used to create tangible “artifacts”—such as images or design elements—that simplify complex ideas. This article highlights how this aspect of design is helpful to both internal stakeholders facilitating the translation of strategy to design and external audiences.
Though an emphasis is often placed on a website’s visual strategy, content—and how people are able to access that content—plays a vital role in communicating what your organization stands for. Forbes examines how site navigation, content legibility, and emotive imagery can create genuine connection with key audiences.
First impressions matter. Your website, social media, flyers, and other design items are often the first thing that people will know about you, and they speak loudly. This article outlines the importance of aesthetics, usability, and people-centered design to bolster rather than undermine your message.
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• How to Set Better Website Metrics for Your Nonprofit
• Launch Your Nonprofit’s New Brand to Build Buy-in and Drive Engagement
• Member Survey Best Practices for Your Nonprofit Brand
• 6 Ways to Build a Strong Brand Through Your Team
When it comes to designing cohesive, on-brand communications for nonprofits, brand guidelines and design templates are tried and true. By taking the guesswork out of design, they help teams quickly create quality content reflective of the brand. However, the production of digital content can get complicated. For nonprofits with multiple related websites or that are publishing-heavy like research institutes, content management across sites grows even more complex.
Enter digital design systems.
Digital design systems are code-based design frameworks that make life easier for anyone designing digital content by translating the core elements of your brand guidelines—think fonts, colors, sizes, illustration, even whole assets—into a single source of truth that designers and web developers can easily access, repurpose, and remix. Instead of contemplating how to combine these elements to your needs, the system will pre-make the design for you. All you have to do is put in the content.
Though digital design systems are traditionally the domain of larger-scale organizations, smaller nonprofits can also find them helpful despite the seemingly heavy lift. Between extensive coding that requires a dedicated dev team and a detailed catalog of the brand’s digital needs, how can creating a whole new system from scratch do anything except pile on more work?
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to. When approached from the right angle, design systems can fit seamlessly into what you’re already doing. Gather the brand guidelines you already have, consider the assets or website structures you repeatedly use, and use them as a database without the frills. Or, if you want to explore more complex systems, programs like Zeroheight and Backlight help you dive into the code and experiment.
Like most aspects of a nonprofit’s brand, design systems aren’t an endpoint. They’re ongoing and should be frequently evaluated to ensure that they maintain brand cohesion. But you’ve gotta start somewhere, and to that effect, our Director of Strategy & UX Paul Sternberg has pulled together resources to get you started on your digital design system journey—whether that be starting from scratch or looking at basic frameworks to use as building blocks for future systems.
What is a design system? Why use (or not use) a design system? What elements make up a design system? And how do I approach adopting a design system? This article by Nielsen Norman Group is a great introduction to the basics.
Head of Design at Github, Diana Mounter, discusses Github’s adoption of design systems, how workflows have been improved, and design system work still to be done. She makes a case for the value of systems and the interaction systems create between design and development.
Using data from their own annual design systems survey, Sparkbox built a study to test whether design systems could increase their efficiency and product outcomes with their own team. The findings? 47% faster development, better visual consistency, and more accessible code.
UI component libraries are integral to digital design systems… but they are only one part. As Shantanu Sinha explains in this article, design systems are much more all-encompassing than just a component library. Design principles, style-guides, patterns, content tones, and rules and specifications around reusable components are all parts that make up an effective design system whole.
Design principles are an integral part of your design system, especially for mission driven social impact organizations. They’re the strategic roots from which you can build out your design system while continuing to be guided by the ideas of your core values and brand strategy. In this article, our Design Director breaks down the basics and talks implementation and best practices.
In this video, Brad Frost, a well-respected design system expert, talks at CSS Day in Amsterdam about the technical aspects of creating and maintaining design systems. From the technical benefits of systems to technical needs to develop an effective system, this talk is chock full of insights and resources.
Like with implementing any other system in your organization, developing and maintaining a design system does not come without its challenges. This brief article from Senior Product Designer Dana Zipnik discusses three common issues: cross-platform deployment, keeping your system alive, and fixing bugs.
In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review podcast, Boeing UX Manager and author Jack Moffett talks to Lou Rosenfeld about the overall importance of design systems for standardizing and scaling activities. He makes a particularly convincing argument for design systems’ power in facilitating UX to web development handoffs.
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• 7 Resources to Help You Understand and Reduce Your Nonprofit’s Technical Debt
• 6 Resources to Achieve Measurable Goals Online
• 7 Resources on Design Principles for Your Nonprofit’s Brand Strategy
There’s no shortage of jargon in web development: Agile Methodology, Test-Driven Development, Versioning Control Systems. For those in the know, these terms are essential to developing great work. For most nonprofit teams who have websites they manage…not so much. But there is one web development concept that affects everyone involved with a nonprofit website, whether they’re engineering experts or completely unfamiliar with technology.
We’re talking, of course, about technical debt.
“What’s technical debt,” you say “and more importantly, why should I care?” Put simply, technical debt is an accumulation of outdated, inefficient, and poorly constructed software engineering —everything from how a digital system is architected to the care that’s put into the code that makes it work.
For most nonprofits this means the quality of your CMS and your website—from the platform and plugins to the code and integrity of the data. If you’ve been frustrated managing an old website, congrats, you’ve got first-hand experience living with technical debt! And technical debt matters because the quality of the code in your website and CMS not only impacts the user experience—it has serious impact on how easy or difficult (and expensive) it is to maintain your digital ecosystem.
Think of it like remodeling an existing house. You start with a grand vision for a spectacular space. But once you start opening up the walls, you’re often in for unpleasant surprises. When redesigning a website, technical debt and the unpleasant surprises it brings are hidden behind figurative walls. And the bigger the website, the bigger the problems technical debt can create.
As web engineers, we deal with technical debt all the time. Sometimes it’s minimal and sometimes it’s massive. Whatever the situation, it’s our responsibility to make sure that our client partners understand technical debt so that together we can make good decisions about how to deal with it.
Navigating this technical minefield is filled with that jargon we mentioned. And if there’s one thing we know, it’s that for complex problems to be solved, they need to be accessible if they are to be understood. With this in mind, we’ve collected resources we rely on to help people understand how their digital systems are built—and how they can be built back better. So, if you’re looking for a primer (or even a bit of a deep dive), we hope they shed some light on technical debt and how to avoid it so that the investments your nonprofit makes in web development are also smart investments in your organization’s future.
Wondering what technical debt actually is and why it matters? This detailed primer has answers for you in clear, jargon-free language. With multiple definitions of the term and analogies that drive the concept home, this resource makes it clear what technical debt is, its impact, and how to effectively communicate its importance.
If you’re more of a visual or auditory learner, this brief video delivers a digestible summary of technical debt concepts to help you identify how to recognize it, discuss it, and account for it. It also outlines the “technical debt quadrant,” a popular way to visualize and assess the technical debt that your organization might be facing.
Clunky software architecture, cutting corners, miscommunication—there are countless causes of technical debt—and equally as many negative effects that it has on your nonprofit. This great article by Daria Stolyar provides excellent strategies to help manage technical debt that can save you from much larger (and more expensive) web development problems in the future.
Joel Spolsky is a bit of a celebrity in the software world, in part because of his skill at communicating complex technical concepts with simplicity. Here, he explains the impact of having new teams take over old code—and how to make that process easier and less costly. In summary, when it comes to creating sustainable software, remember this cardinal rule of programming: “It’s harder to read code than to write it.”
Understanding the consequences of technical debt is key to managing it efficiently. This article by Yaniv Preiss succinctly explains some of the most important impacts. Though we may not realize it, prioritizing speed over quality when creating digital projects (though tempting), often leads to bigger problems down the line, such as slower website performance and higher maintenance costs.
Looking for more than an article’s worth of understanding on technical debt issues? This book by Marianne Bellotti dives into the deep end of technical debt, providing abstract principles and tangible strategies for slaying the beast, regardless of the age or state of the system (and without burning through tons of money in the process).
When it comes to technical debt, the struggle is real. But that doesn’t mean it needs to instill fear in the hearts of teams! Positively reframing it as “technical wealth” allows us to shift our understanding towards a beneficial cause. After all, “stronger and more efficient [systems] should be viewed as worthy of up-front investment.”
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• 6 Resources to Achieve Measurable Goals Online
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It’s easy to view a website as a fixed thing—kind of like a house. You start with a plan, create a blueprint, build it, and then move in. But a nonprofit’s website is much more like a living ecosystem than a static thing—one which must support thousands of people continuously entering and exiting it. And how we approach supporting this ecosystem once it exists determines whether it will thrive or not.
Creating a website to represent a social impact organization and help advance its mission starts with establishing goals (or KPIs). Great effort is put into conducting research and collaborating on design so that it’s as effective as possible in achieving these goals. If budget allows, we may even do user testing of prototypes during the design process to confirm that our assumptions are correct before we commit to creating. Eventually the exciting day arrives that we launch our new website! Then what?
Nonprofits with the most successful websites usually realize that measuring and optimizing their performance is a vital part of the mission. Organizations who rely on their websites for donations or to drive action through campaigns often focus on measuring performance because the link between goals and outcomes is so strong. But think tanks, research institutes, and foundations who emphasize publishing, knowledge sharing, and capacity building also have website goals. Whatever a nonprofit’s approach to change is, the key to maintaining a successful website is being clear on the goals and then committing to achieve them.
This work of measurable design is some of the stuff that Constructive’s Director of Strategy & UX, Paul Sternberg loves most. Interested in tools and techniques to make your digital strategy more measurable and your website more effective in achieving your goals? Then have a look at the resources Paul’s pulled together from our practice to help with everything from planning and research through to continuous testing. Not only can they help you improve in the near-term, the ongoing improvement they offer can also extend the life of your website by making sure it continues to achieve the goals you have for it.
Optimizing website performance starts with organized research. Getting this right makes all of the difference in analyzing results. Traditional spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets are great, but Airtable is the tool we love most for making research more connected and beautiful.
Google Analytics are great for giving you an external view of how people use your website. But what about the on-page experience? Crazyegg is an analytics platform that provides invaluable insight into user behavior with heat maps, scroll maps, and click details—then helps you improve with A/B testing, session recordings, and more.
Where Optimizely stands out from the analytics offered on Google Analytics and softwares like Crazegg is in the breadth of its website conversion resources and data. Insights into which of your site visitors are making online donations or joining your community in other ways are invaluable to your funding efforts and engaging with your audiences consistently.
Moves management is the process of cultivating relationships over time, from awareness to active engagement. In this primer, Salesforce explains how nonprofits can use marketing funnels to build trust, show impact, inspire action, and move audiences to increase their contributions to supporting the mission, whatever form it takes.
Design that achieves your goals starts with knowing your audience. Personas and archetypes are mainstays of painting a picture of who you’re designing for. But which is better and why? Can you use both? UX Collective breaks down personas and archetypes and how to think about using them.
Website experiences occur across pages and over time. But often, design work involves static wireframes and comps. Enter user flows. They’re an invaluable way to make sure the website you design achieves your goals and your audiences’. In this article, The Interactive Design Foundation teaches how you can analyze the flow of audiences’ journeys through your website to accomplish both your and their specific goals.
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• 7 Resources on Design Principles for Your Nonprofit’s Brand Strategy
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Design is how a nonprofit’s brand strategy is made visible and tangible. Of course, the more accurate and authentic the design is in translating this strategy, the more aligned the designed experiences a nonprofit creates for audiences will be—online, in print, or in person. The key is to ensure consistency and cohesion—because consistently meeting people’s expectations of what the brand stands for is how a nonprofit builds trust with their audiences.
To help design teams translate the essence of a nonprofit’s strategy into well-designed experiences, it’s essential that the core ideas be front-and-center. Brand strategy documents can be dense and it’s important that everyone who contributes to designing the brand has a shorthand to envision, explore, and evaluate how well things like logos, websites, and events represent what the brand stands for.
That’s where design principles come in. But what are they and why are they so effective?
Design principles are concise, strategic, actionable statements that focus attention on a brand’s values, the value it creates for audiences, and in the case of social impact organizations, the value it creates for the world. When put front-and-center in your design process, design principles establish the strategic roots needed to grow a strong and healthy brand. They center everyone responsible for contributing to the design of the brand on what matters most—resulting in a more consistent and values-aligned design system.
All the above is why establishing design principles that are based in brand strategy are central to Constructive’s strategy and design practice. For this Constructively Curated, we’ve collected the following resources for those interested in learning more about what they are, how they work, and why they matter. From a How-To to an open source library of resources and our own article on the topic, there’s a lot to explore on how to make design principles an important part of designing a strong nonprofit brand.
This article by digital designer Shane P. Williams offers a thorough outline on creating design principles in an organization through a collaborative workshop environment. The workshop framework is easy-to-follow and allows designers & non-designers alike to bring their perspectives to the table.
In this insight, our former Design Director, Karla Despradel, shares her perspective on putting design principles to work for your social impact organization. She breaks down the basics of design principles, why your nonprofit should have them, and she talks implementation & best practices.
Principles.Design is a large open source collection of 1,448 design principles included in 195 examples from 167 creators. The project, created by independent product designer Ben Brignell, aims to build out a history of design principles and analyze what makes a design principle good?
A great way to learn more about design principles and begin to brainstorm principles for your own organization is to digest as many effective examples as possible. Here is tech giant IBM’s principles that are clear, unique, and have further prompting questions to evoke effective implementation.
The next useful principles at use example we have included is presented by Apple for IOS developers looking to develop apps to add to the Apple app store. These design principles for developers are heavily UX focused, user-centric, and clear, making them effective.
While the two above examples include principles that are more abstract, the principles offered by Google for their product icons are much more visual and straightforward. These principles might seem granular to non-designers, but they are key to maintaining consistency across Google’s web presence.
Now that we’ve laid out basics, it’s time to discuss the benefits of design principles, and an entire design system. This article offers one important benefit. Design systems prepare your organization to iterate and change over time without forcing you to reinvent the wheel that is your design identity.
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• 8 Great Resources to Improve Your Strategic Workshop Facilitation
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Strategy and design are inherently collaborative. And workshops are an essential part of an inclusive and accessible design process that leads to the co-creation needed to produce great and effective work. Especially if your work is built on the principles of human-centered design. For nonprofits and agencies who want to apply workshop facilitation strategies with attention to an inclusive design process, there’s no shortage of philosophies on workshop collaboration—and an equally large number of different frameworks to apply. Especially now in the new world of remote, online workshops.
Over the years, we’ve tried a lot of them—and we’ve made up a bunch of our own. What we’ve learned is that, regardless of what methods you use, emphasizing open dialogue, creative problem solving, and using well-defined exercises that are understood and accessible to all are essential to designing brand experiences that are closely aligned with a nonprofit’s brand strategy. They’re also invaluable to ensuring that our strategy and design work are closely connected to our values and higher purpose.
Making sure that everyone who needs a seat at the workshop table has one and then setting them up for success will unlock a diversity of perspectives, opinions, and ideas on which to build your brand. If that sounds right up your alley, then this month’s Constructively Curated on facilitating strategic workshops is just for you. We hope they’re helpful and inspire you to take your work to new heights.
This comprehensive guide includes how-tos and lessons learned by the team who hosted TED’s first-ever virtual design sprint. From basics and a how-to guide, to specific activities, outcomes, and more, this is a great place to start if you’re looking to become familiar with facilitating virtual design workshops.
Robert Skrobe, the organizer of The Global Virtual Design Sprint, and an owner of his own design sprint organization, joins The Naked Ambition podcast on this episode to discuss the transition from physical to virtual design sprints and how to effectively workshop and communicate virtually.
The Creative Problem Solving Institute, hosted by the creators of “brainstorming” The Creative Education Foundation, is the longest running creativity conference in the world. The annual conference focuses on teaching individuals of all professions new skills and tools for creative problem-solving.
SessionLab is a tool to better design and plan your virtual workshops, with templates, timers, and organizational tools so you can host with confidence. Sessionlab’s Blog and Library of Facilitation Techniques for download are both immensely helpful for getting started workshop planning.
The LEGO Serious Play methodology is based off of research showing that hands-on, minds-on learning can open meaningful and interesting dialogues for an organization. Participants are led through activities using 3D Lego models as a jumping off point for collaboration and creative problem-solving.
In this podcast episode, graphic designer and innovation leader Leo Chan discusses a host of resources for innovation and creative workshop facilitation. Workshop activities, innovation and workshop facilitation training, books on creativity, successful workshop examples—all of these topics are covered.
The guest on this podcast episode, Suzanne Rose, a Sergeant of the Queensland Police Service in Australia, runs professional development workshops for training staff. Her and host Leanne Hughes discuss facilitating with confidence, increasing participation, and how to avoid first time mistakes.
This activity betters your team’s collaboration by allowing each team member to communicate the conditions in which they work the best. Team members create user manuals outlining what they need to effectively communicate, work, and collaborate—and then share with the rest of the team!
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Whether you work with a nonprofit or a social impact design firm, how much you prioritize digital accessibility is a demonstration of your values. That’s because design exists to serve people and social impact design serves to create a better world. If we are to commit to accessible design, we should elevate our aspirations higher and commit to inclusive design as a core pillar in our strategy and design practices. Because inclusive design practices are where the seeds of accessible design are planted. Inclusive design embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we hope these inclusive design resources aid you in developing work that caters to people with a range of experiences, needs, backgrounds, and abilities. Inclusive design is the difference between designing for “audiences” or “stakeholders” and remembering that everything we design is for an individual person—and is experienced by that individual person.
Constructive’s Senior Strategist, Titania Veda, brings a decade of expertise in social impact service design and program design, and places inclusive design practices at the center of her work. Below, she’s curated 10 of her favorite resources on inclusive design—including resources that supported her work with the City of Austin, Texas to create their first-ever lived experience initiative to meet the challenges of people experiencing homelessness—all of which contribute to the mindset that Constructive’s team brings to our human-centered design practice. We hope that this month’s Constructively Curated inspires you to design brand experiences that are not only accessible when completed but inclusive when conceived.
The IDRC is an international community of developers, designers, researchers, educators & co-designers who work to ensure the newest technology and practices are designed inclusively. The IDRC is a hub for any inclusive design resources you may want or need, from articles to open source tools—and even an annual conference.
If you’re looking to understand exactly what inclusive design entails, especially as it relates to creating digital learning experiences, this short read is for you. It breaks down three ideas central to inclusive design and learning: recognizing diversity and uniqueness, using inclusive processes and tools, and enabling broader beneficial impact.
This virtual group hosts speakers and conversations bridging the gap between developers and accessibility professionals. A11yTalks encourages participants to share & learn from each other in a safe and inclusive environment. You can visit their site to sign up for upcoming talks or their Youtube for an archive of previous talks.
How are companies actually incorporating inclusivity into their workflow? Microsoft Design published their inclusive design principles to answer just this—along with a useful toolkit of inclusive design resources. Microsoft’s free toolkit introduces and familiarizes design teams, and gives them tools to integrate inclusivity into their workflow too.
The Centre for Inclusive Design is an industry leader in inclusive and accessible design, working with clients to create inclusive design processes and strategies, and promoting a future where inclusive design is the norm. Their resource hub includes written guides, tools, reports, and an inspiration series that we recommend digging into.
The Inclusive Designers podcast was created by Janet Roche and Carolyn Robbins to be a collaborative forum for designers to share ideas and advocate for designing with dignity. You can listen to the two seasons of their podcast directly on their website, or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.
Liberatory Design is a creative problem-solving approach and practice founded on the principles of equity and designing for liberation. The co-creators recognize that equity challenges are complex, and even the best intentioned design efforts can fall short. Visit their site to learn more and download a free Liberatory Design Deck.
This brief Youtube video from NNGroup explains clearly the importance of designing with inclusivity in mind, and easy ways to do so. Inclusive design should be about more than just clearing a path for people, it should also be about putting down a welcome mat—designing with thought and care for every individual.
Trina of @ux.forthewin shares posts on Instagram dedicated to user experience, designing for inclusivity, and advocating for human-centered technology. Her page is a place for UX professionals to connect, discuss, and share resources, and it is a great follow if you’re looking to stay connected to inclusive design conversations on the daily.
Jessica Ivins of Center Centre, a UX design school, collects resources on inclusivity and accessible design daily, and she has compiled 15 of these informational resources in this article. If you’re still looking for more books, articles, podcasts, or other resources on inclusive design (even after this newsletter!) gleam through these recommendations.
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• 8 Resources to Build a Social Media Presence and Strategy for Your Nonprofit
• 7 Service Design Resources for Greater Social Impact
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When engaging audiences online, social media is a foundation for many nonprofits’ communications strategies. Raising awareness. Elevating insights. Sharing resources. Cultivating community. Whatever mix of approaches social impact organizations use, there’s a lot that nonprofits can do through social media strategy to tangibly support their missions—and multiple platforms to choose from that cater to different types of audiences. And unlike many other types of strategic communications, to be effective, social media is a channel that requires constant, ongoing effort.
Taken together, it can all feel a little overwhelming. Where to start if you’re just starting your social media strategy? How to prioritize and sustain existing efforts? What’s most effective in different platforms and why? How to measure results and adjust? And what are the right nonprofit social media resources for your nonprofit’s strategy? For organizations who want to get social media engagement right, it’s a constant process of planning, trying new things out, getting feedback, and improving from there. And unless you have an in-house social media expert or an agency to dedicate time to it all, success can feel more like error than trial.
At Constructive, our Higher Purpose is engagement. It’s a North Star that’s based on our vision and values that guides our work every day towards a better world—and social media is just one of the ways that we reach out to our community and also help our clients succeed online. So, guided by our Higher Purpose, for this week’s Constructively Curated, our Digital Marketing Associate, Kaylee Gardner has collected some of the best resources that she’s found to help crafting Constructive’s social media efforts. From the basics to more advanced ideas, we hope that you’ll find useful inspiration to strengthen your social media engagement.
If you’re still skeptical about investing time and resources into social media, check out this article. It defines many potential benefits to having a social media presence from being able to start conversations to growing your network or volunteer community. It also outlines important steps to getting started on social media for you to consider.
All social media platforms were not created equal and don’t work to serve the exact same purposes. It’s important to pick platforms to post on that will support your marketing and more holistic organizational goals. Check out this article to learn more about deciding between some of the major platforms: Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook & Reddit.
One of the most important parts of developing effective social media content is writing captions and posts that resonate with your audience. But not every team has an experienced copywriter; so this article includes basic tips for nonprofits looking to write posts that will connect with their community and increase engagement.
Designing visual posts for social media can become a headache when every social media platform requires different media dimensions for images and videos. This guide includes the most updated specs for all major social media sites & post types that you can reference any time you go to begin designing a new post.
If your organization doesn’t have designers or access to costly design softwares, this free online design tool, Canva, is a great easy to use resource that’s built to make social media design accessible for anybody. Canva has pre-made templates for any social media size you may need and can be integrated with any of your social accounts.
Many social media platforms leave a lot to be wanted when it comes to digital accessibility, which means that users have to take on the burden of making their content accessible to all. In addition to looking at the accessibility pages for each platform (Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook) this helpful toolkit is one of many available online.
As with any other activity, when your organization begins to build a social media strategy and post for the first time mistakes are inevitable. This list includes eight different mistakes that often interfere with nonprofit’s goals because they’re easy to make (but also just as easy to avoid if you know what they are!).
The best advice that nonprofits can receive on the topic of social media strategy clearly comes from other nonprofits who have already been effectively using social media. This collection of quotes offers just this with tips for social media success developed with the advice of individuals from thirty-two different nonprofits.
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Lots of people are talking about service design these days. But what exactly is service design and how can designers and nonprofit communicators apply service design tools and practices to improve their work?
Constructive’s Senior Strategist, Titania Veda likes to say that service design is the process of improving existing services and creating new services to fulfill the needs of people—whether it’s online or in person. Great services are verbs rather than nouns—they focus on the jobs people need done or the problems they need fixed rather than the typical activities used to do so. Most important, great service design is created within the context of the lived experience of the people for which it’s created.
As designers, all of our work—whether it’s branding, UX, UI, or brand experience design—falls underneath the umbrella of service design. And since most nonprofits are essentially service design businesses for social impact, service design offers a huge opportunity for nonprofits to be more effective in their missions. By taking a human-centered approach to our work with clients, service design provides the strategic lens needed to assess the value we create for our clients in the social impact sector—and evaluate how well our efforts support them in their own mission-driven work.
In this edition of Constructively Curated, Titania has selected a few of her great service design resources, spanning books, courses, online communities, and beyond to introduce service design in an approachable and comprehensive way. We hope you’ll find the resources interesting and that they spark conversations and new ways of working service design practices into your organization.
If you are still confused on what service design is or looking for the basics, this book is great. With more than twenty three international authors it presents a broad and simple introduction to service design through principles, individual perspectives, adaptable SD tools, case studies and more.
The Service Design Show is a website filled with interactive courses, interviews, articles and practical tips all focused on the development of your service design skills. The founder Marc is the co-founder of The Netherlands first service design agency and emphasizes a human-first approach to design and teaching you the fundamentals.
We recommend digging into this presentation to hear the perspectives of many senior design professionals on the evolution, current state, and future of service design as a discipline. Developed from the 2016 research of Matteo Remondini, this report hails from London, the city that is considered the birthplace of service design.
Want to connect and interact with other Service Design professionals around the globe? This Slack workspace gives you the opportunity to do just that with various channels, opportunities for knowledge-sharing and discussion, events and local chapters to engage with. More than four thousand professionals have already joined.
This free online method library makes getting to work easy by offering instructions, guidelines, and tips-and-tricks to allow you to exercise key methods of service design in interactive and engaging ways. The activities span all areas of service design from research to ideation to prototyping and facilitation.
Similar to the above method library, Service Design Tools is a site with an open collection of tools and tutorials to get you started on approaching tasks with a service design mindset. This site will take you through the entire design process allowing you to answer the when? who? what? and how? questions that are sure to arise.
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• 8 Resources for Nonprofit Social Media Strategy
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• 8 Resources for Effective Data-Driven Storytelling
We Hope Everybody had a Great Pride Month! And in honor of pride we have put together this Constructively Curated with some great resources about LGBTQ+ history, communications, design, and workplace inclusion.
We believe it’s important each and every person feels respected and valued inside and outside their workplace—regardless of their gender or sexual identity. As communications and design professionals we should be actively working to make sure our words and designs capture these values and in no way contribute to negative stereotyping or rhetoric. As social impact professionals, it is also vital we’re approaching LGBTQ+ advocacy in a way that’s validating, respectful, and inclusive. We hope you find these resources helpful and engaging. Pride month may only come around once a year but pride and allyship themselves are boundless.
If you’re looking for a brief history on the push for LGBTQ+ rights in America, take a look at this timeline put together by PBS. From Stonewall to the repeal of “Dont Ask, Don’t Tell” and beyond, it outlines many of the major milestones that have been achieved by the gay right’s movement from 1924 up to 2015.
The LGBTQ+ community has not only a rich history of symbols and visuals, but a wide-spanning aesthetic that can make for amazing and eye-catching graphic design. In this brief style guide, Jamahl Johnson outlines ways businesses can approach design with an LGBTQ+ audience in mind from his own queer perspective.
In this keynote talk, Evan Wolfson discusses his marriage equality work as founder of the Freedom to Marry organization credited with leading to the landmark 2015 Supreme Court decision. He focuses on the way communications research/techniques made the Freedom to Marry campaign a success—watch the whole talk at the video linked.
In this podcast episode, Fast Company editor Kathleen Davis has a conversation about the importance of trans worker rights with Gabriel Arkles, the senior counsel at the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund. The two discuss the challenges of being trans in the workplace & how employers and allies can help.
This media reference guide put together by GLAAD outlines ways journalists and media professionals can accurately and inclusively speak about LGBTQ+ people and experiences. From terminology to discussion of LGBTQ+ issues (and more), this guide is comprehensive yet extensive.
This library is an amazing place to look for resources if you want to present genuine and representative media along with your words. In this free stock photo collection from Vice, you can find photos of multiple non-binary and trans models living their unique and authentic lives with friends, in the workplace, and more.
This short read includes five steps workplaces can take to ensure they’re fostering an inclusive and discrimination free space for their LGBTQ+ workers. From hiring processes to professional development and inclusive healthcare coverage, there are many opportunities to increase focus on making your company welcoming to all.
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Check out our other Curated Resources such as 8 Resources for Impactful Nonprofit Visual Storytelling and 8 Resources for Countering Anti-Asian Racism and Uplifting Asian Communities.
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