Whether you’re a nonprofit, think tank, or other social impact organization, you probably draw on visual storytelling devices—photos, illustrations, data visualizations, memes, emojis, and more—in your external communications. These visual tools enliven your brand narrative. They enable you to communicate about your mission, your values, the communities you serve, and your impact in ways that establish emotional connections and drive deep engagement.
Visual storytelling, however, is far from neutral. The images you share may paint the communities your organization represents in demeaning ways, while the memes and GIFs you use on informal communication platforms may inadvertently participate in digital blackface. Before you know it, despite your best intentions, your mission—of fostering equality and social justice—is turned on its head. Attentive and intentional visual storytelling, however, can uplift communities, champion inclusivity, and challenge your audience’s assumptions.
These resources are excellent springboards for telling engaging and ethical stories by leveraging diverse, authentic, and empowering visual tools and practices. We hope the perspectives shared here help you lift others up while presenting a compelling brand narrative for your organization.
Images are key components of your nonprofit’s brand—they help quickly communicate your mission to diverse stakeholders and elicit sustained engagement. But, for these images to drive impact, it’s important for them to be authentic, inclusive, and empowering. How do you make sure your images meet these criteria? Here’s a handy checklist. From choosing images that paint the communities you’re representing in a positive light to avoiding poverty porn, these tips will help you tell your nonprofit’s story in the most ethical and visually compelling way possible.
This Communications Network resource offers a list of considerations and suggestions to keep in mind when sourcing images for humanitarian impact. From seeking your subjects’ consent to contextualizing the images you produce, this guide encourages taking an important pause to center ethical image-generating practices.
If you want to make a splash by telling your nonprofit’s story visually, but production costs (time, effort, money, and personnel) are forcing you to reconsider, check out the visual design tools mentioned in this article. With easily customizable templates, professional themes, and intuitive design processes, these tools promise to make thoughtful image and video-creation a breeze.
Sometimes, collaboration yields powerful visual resources for your nonprofit’s storytelling needs—and in this case, collaboration might look like drawing from a library of inclusive stock images created by people with disabilities (with the appropriate crediting, of course). Check out this resource for a library of images depicting disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), along with some specifically LGBTQ+-themed pictures, that you can incorporate into your communications and branding.
If your nonprofit doesn’t boast a fully Black staff, avoid using memes and GIFs that feature Black people. This is a form of digital blackface—a practice that stereotypes Black people and uses exaggerated caricatures for entertainment or as vehicles for one’s thoughts and emotions. It’s harmful, demeaning, and frankly, just not cool.
The skin-tone choice you make when using an emoji in public communications is significant. If you’re a predominantly white-staffed or white-led nonprofit, using a non-white emoji doesn’t empower BIPOC (unless used in a specific context such as the Black Lives Matter movement); instead, it denies your race privilege. Check out this article to understand why seemingly small communication choices, such as selecting one skin-tone emoji over another, has deep social implications and sends very specific messages about your organization’s brand.
Using color strategically in visualizations helps you tell your data-related story in a way that commands attention. This article provides a number of useful tips on how to make these color choices in ways that drive maximum impact. Some key takeaways: don’t shy away from using gray; use intuitive colors to represent specific ideas; and finally, avoid the pink-blue combination for gender-related data.
The resources we offer here are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to inclusive visual storytelling best practices. And so, we’re closing by offering you this compilation of articles, thought pieces, and stock photo libraries you can return to, to tell the most engaging visual story possible about your nonprofit or social impact organization.
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Check out our other Curated Resources such as 8 Resources for Countering Anti-Asian Racism and Uplifting Asian Communities and 8 Resources for Effective, Ethical Nonprofit Data-Driven Storytelling.
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Anti-Asian hate crimes have surged across America over the last 12 months. Donald Trump and the Republican Party stoked this violence in our culture for a full year, racializing a virus they had no interest in protecting Americans from so they could shift blame from their own failure. Some of us called it out as racist at the time, but amidst a pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprising, many glossed over anti-Asian racism once again.
We’ve been here before. America has a shameful past of policies that scapegoat and punish Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander American communities dating back to the 1800s. This is a stain that has been minimized and overlooked, glossed over with a “model minority” trope that tells us everything is A-OK with Asian communities in America. America—particularly white America—has conveniently convinced itself that Asians are not the targets of racism. And as a result, these communities have often been left out of racial justice conversations and movements.
Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander Americans are living through a horrific and heartbreaking surge in verbal and physical violence—3,800 reported cases since the GOP set their plan in motion. And countless others are not reported at all.
It’s our collective responsibility to condemn hate against all people and to ensure justice and equality for all. Constructive is committed to doing our part by dedicating ourselves to deeper learning on America’s shameful and painful history of Anti-Asian racism and by dedicating a significant percentage of our annual donations to organizations that uplift and protect Asian communities.
Enough is enough, we must act now. Below, we’ve included some resources to help you practice anti-racist communications and support organizations fighting against anti-Asian racism.
— Matt Schwartz and the Constructive Team
Even though hate crimes are committed by individuals, Anti-Asian racism doesn’t start or end with them. Racism is systemic—it’s framed by longer histories and maintained institutionally—and needs to be talked about as such. While raising awareness about the systemic roots of discrimination is key, the enormity of the problem can easily lead to people feeling helpless. That’s exactly why it’s also important to communicate that systems can, in fact, be changed for the better.
Being anti-racist is an active, intentional practice. Use this list of eight tips, put together by the Communications Network, as a checklist to ensure that your communications aren’t racist—explicitly or implicitly. From ensuring you’re being a true advocate rather than a performative one to being more attentive to the messages the photos that you share communicate, this list helps you rethink your digital communications.
Anti-Asian racism doesn’t only manifest in the form of headline-worthy hate crimes; it’s present all around us, everyday, as microaggressions that we ignore or even laugh off. But not anymore. This document provides an overview of common microaggressions, the underlying messages they relay, and how to shut them down.
Data visualizations are excellent storytelling tools that can help people grasp messages quickly and effectively. But this superpower can be easily misused. Learning about the telltale signs of a malicious data visualization enables you to critically evaluate the messages you’re being fed—which can often be discriminatory or hate-filled.
This guide, compiled by the National Education Association, provides an overview of seven harmful racial discourse practices that smuggle in damaging racist narratives, while also discussing how you can steer clear of them in your communications.
We must all speak up in the face of bigotry. This Learning for Justice resource recommends four communication strategies to counter and neutralize racist rhetoric: Interrupt, Question, Educate, and Echo. These strategies reflect an ethos of active intervention—one we should all be willing to adopt—online and offline, to stop hate in its tracks.
After the Atlanta shootings, the Asian American Journalists’ Association (AAJA) put out this guide to advise news outlets on how to responsibly cover anti-Asian hate crimes. The recommendations in it are applicable to all of us speaking up against the string of attacks that have occurred these past few months. From avoiding assumptions to refraining from using language that could further hypersexualize Asian women, these pointers are ones we should all take seriously.
While there are a number of ways to support Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander American communities, it’s also important to put our money where our mouth is and make sure that organizations advocating for these communities are well-resourced in these times. New York Magazine put together a comprehensive list of 68 organizations and funds, along with brief descriptions of what they do, to help you pick the initiatives you’d like to support.
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Check out our other Curated Resources such as 8 Resources for Effective, Ethical Nonprofit Data-Driven Storytelling and 7 Resources for Establishing Authentic Connections with Communities.
Want more bi-weekly roundups of resources from Constructive’s team like this one? Sign up for our newsletter!
If you’re a nonprofit think tank or research institute, then communicating with data and statistics is probably important to your mission. Even if you’re just a nonprofit or foundation looking to tell stories in your annual report or website, getting ethical storytelling right is important—especially when it involves data.
Partnering with research-driven nonprofits is a big part of Constructive’s work, so we’re constantly looking for new ways to help nonprofits design with data. Effective data visualization design is the answer—but it’s only the beginning. This is because, to achieve the greatest social impact, data-driven communication and design for nonprofits have to be both intentional and inclusive. And on top of it, nonprofits need to navigate all sorts of amazing data visualization tools.
At its core, while designing data may be daunting for some, data visualization is really just a storytelling technique. It’s just a way of giving visual form to information and numbers in order to communicate a narrative. Our goal is to help people understand complex dynamics more quickly and ideally, develop an emotional connection to what the data is telling them to catalyzes action. It does take a certain mindset to be able to design and communicate effectively with data. Embracing complexity, seeing patterns, re-imagining how data sets can be turned into designed experiences that help nonprofits communicate more effectively are essential.
If you’re looking to learn the fundamentals or dig into more advanced ideas, here are some of our favorite resources for telling impact stories with effective and ethical data visualization practices.
Data visualization is a narrative technique that brings numbers and data to life in a picture to help tell a well-researched story. This article from Forbes breaks down the three key reasons why data visualization is such a compelling communications tool for building a shared understanding with audiences. First, it helps people understand information faster and more intuitively; second, it communicates emotion to readers through strategic design elements such as font, color choice and layout, and draws an action-oriented response from them; last but not the least, it helps create a shared understanding among key stakeholders.
We love this blog by Mathieu Guglielmino because it leans heavily into how data visualization is a particularly nifty tool for fostering empathy. Why is that, you ask? Visualizations help communicate quantity in a way few things—not even numbers—can. And this experience of scale catalyzes long-lasting emotional states that drive action. Our favorite quote from this piece: “We have become numb to numbers, awash in cold quantification. This lack of a sense of quantity has tremendous consequence on our collective lives. Data are important, but not by themselves. American Nobel Prize winner for literature, Toni Morrison, wrote “Data is not wisdom, is not knowledge,” meaning that without a story, statistics distance us from empathy. If words won’t do it, visual processing through space and affect is a natural way to feel quantities.”
This article dives deep into recent trends in data visualization that social impact organizations can leverage to help real-world changes register with their audiences. It offers a rich menu of options you can choose from to tell more impactful data-driven stories that engage readers: turning data into games and intellectual exercises, “showing” rather than telling the large number you are trying to communicate to your stakeholders, animating data to help people better understand and retain it, humanizing numbers with story elements, and inviting reader participation to transform data content.
If we embrace Marshal McLuan’s idea that “The Medium is the Message,” then the tools we use when designing digital data visualization are incredibly influential in how effective a nonprofit’s data-driven communications are. Of course, there are a ton of platforms and technologies to chose from. In this webinar, Jake Garcia and George Ford from the Foundation Center help navigate the world interactive map-making and charting applications that nonprofits can use to communicate impact.
Time to put our designer hats on! Descriptive titles, subtitles, annotations, and color saturation? These design details are essential when it comes to making sure that your data visually communicates a persuasive story. But wait a second! Aren’t there important questions we should be asking to take a smarter approach to design decisions to be more intentional about how we use them? Of course! Start with these questions: Who are your viewers? What information do they need? Do they want to see the data presented as-is, or do they want you to interpret the data?
We’re strong advocates of fostering diversity, equity and inclusion through design and communications practices. This UX Collective article turns to color palettes used in data visualization projects to explore how you can make them more accessible. The charts and graphs you use aren’t doing the work you want them to if colorblind audiences can’t visually differentiate between the different segments of your visualized data. The answer isn’t hard, it’s just a strategic combination of good design and attention to color contrast.
Data by itself means nothing. It has to be cleaned, organized, visualized, and interpreted so that it can tell the best stories. This article holds that the most effective data-driven stories come from exploring and making visible data relationships. Here’s a quick 5-step process you can follow to visualize these relationships. Some questions you should ask yourself as you do this work are: Does the data support or disprove my hypothesis? Does it debunk a widely held belief? Did data increase, decrease, or flatline? Does the data show any differences between groups? What are the top 10 (or bottom 10) observations for a metric or variable?
Annual reports are a cornerstone of an effective communications strategy, especially when they elevate effective data visualization. Lucy Todd’s blog post makes a strong case for incorporating more visual elements in your annual reports to make them stand out. Making use of data visualization in your annual report enables you, as a social impact organization, to show your achievements rather than merely tell them—and this changes how people attend to, understand, and respond to you for the better.
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Check out our other Curated Resources such as 7 Resources for Establishing Authentic Connections with Communities and 13 Ideas Guiding Our Thinking in 2021.
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At the heart of every social impact organization is the community it exists to serve. The people who a nonprofit empowers inspire mission statements and motivate teams to show up and be present at work. It’s easy, however, for the humanity of these communities to get lost in day-to-day operations.
Nurturing authentic relationships with your organization’s community, whether through storytelling, research, or program co-creation, takes time and dedicated effort. It requires perspective shifts and sometimes challenging conversations. But it’s a worthy—no, necessary—pursuit for organizations aspiring to live their values.
Here’s a roundup of our favorite resources for establishing authentic connections with the communities one serves and/or represents. These articles have been influential in guiding and challenging how we approach our work, and we hope they provide the same value for you.
We’re big fans of design thinking. So we love the strategies community-based researcher Aakanksha Sinha shares here to promote empathy, authenticity, and collaboration between nonprofits and the communities they serve during program design.
This article from Classy powerfully suggests that empowering beneficiaries to be partners in program design is the most effective way to ensure long-term, sustainable change. Sometimes, success looks like stepping away and letting local actors be the drivers of future solutions.
This article from the Narrative Institute defines the concept of polyvocal narrative strategy and explores the ways in which it can create durable narrative change. Our favorite quote: “a polyvocal approach is like an ocean current, pulling water across the ocean and holding the power to shape landscapes.”
Fostering authentic relationships with communities goes beyond research methods—creating an environment conducive to empathy, connection, and co-creation is an equally important facet of community engagement that’s often overlooked.
Social impact organizations commonly place storytelling at the heart of their communications strategy. But what are the ethics of sharing a beneficiary’s story? This article breaks down the emerging ethical storytelling movement, and the ways it might impact nonprofit communicators.
This article from the Communications Network makes the case for empathetic research methods, and explains why research is often one of the most powerful tools nonprofits can use to understand and check-in with their communities without making assumptions.
This article from the First Nations Development Initiative interrogates the ways in which the standard philanthropic mindset centers a Western perspective that focuses on problems, needs, and deficits—and often flies in the face of non-Western cultural values.
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Check out our other Curated Resources such as 13 Ideas Guiding Our Thinking in 2021 and 7 Ways COVID-19 is Transforming the Social Impact Sector.
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Well, the year that felt like it may never end is finally coming to a close. Over the last 9 months, a global pandemic caused the world to stand still; remote work became the norm; a new antiracist movement blossomed in response to the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others; and technology turned from an important part of our lives to an essential way to stay connected.
These pivotal moments caused a lot of organizations to rethink the ways they’ve always done things. A wealth of new ideas and trends surfaced in response. As a company committed to learning and improving every day, we’re excited about the ideas that emerged this year and how they’ll help us continue to change for the better in the years to come. And we’re also being thoughtful about the ones worth paying attention to.
So we caught up with our Design, Content, Technology, and Project Management teams to go beyond the trends of 2020, and learn about the ideas guiding their perspectives as they head into the new year. We hope their ideas will help you start 2021 with a fresh outlook.
From the Design Team
Our Design team goes into the new year mindful of design’s role in supporting mental health, and advancing social change. While they’re exploring emerging functions like variable SVG shapes and creative use of movement, they’re also focused on cutting through the digital noise by keeping information easy to engage with. Especially as technology becomes an even more essential part of our lives.
From the Content Team
Drawing upon the racial justice movement seen across the country this year, our Content team focuses on ways to deepen their understanding of narrative change and expand notions of what makes a “good” story. Similar to the Design team, they’re mindful of content overload and look to focus on clear content design in the new year.
From the Technology Team
Stripped of most face-to-face interaction, the world became more reliant than ever on technology to connect them this year. As we look ahead to 2021, our Development team is assessing emerging technologies like Gutenberg and PHP 8 to understand if and how they might improve the sites we build. Above all, they continue to incorporate ways of building accessibility into our process, so everyone can engage with the experiences we create.
From our Project Managers
For our Project Management team, the shift to remote work this year put our internal processes to the test. For them, the new year will bring a renewed focus on content-first approaches to website design as a way of standardizing project North Stars across our now geographically-distributed team. They also expect the increased focus on resourcing and planning to carry over in 2021.
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Check out our other Curated Resources such as 7 Ways COVID-19 is Transforming the Social Impact Sector and 7 Ways to Be Antiracist through Design and Communications.
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We focused an earlier piece on how nonprofit communicators were responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations have been creatively rethinking their business-as-usual, pivoting their fundraising, grantmaking, and service provision efforts to meet unexpected and increasingly urgent needs.
As innovators and designers at heart, we were hopeful about what these big changes might mean for the future of social impact work. A few months later, our hope has turned into real optimism. Change was adopted quickly to respond to what we all thought would be a short-term crisis, and it’s becoming clear that the social impact sector is in the midst of a much larger transformation.
This time around, we’re sharing seven perspectives that capture the spirit of this transformation. We hope these ideas will help your own efforts to embrace and navigate this profound moment of change.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many nonprofits to get creative with how they fundraise and engage with their audiences. While a lot of that creativity happened out of necessity, it has potential for long-term, permanent change for the better. Nonprofit strategist Steve Zimmerman encourages organizations to focus on impact, people, finances, and community to reimagine and reinvent the status quo.
For international NGOs conducting field work in areas without reliable access to power and internet, social distancing has expedited the need for digital transformation. There will always be work that can only be done in-person, but Rakesh Bharania, director of humanitarian impact at Salesforce, argues that NGOs should still prioritize increasing their digital capacity to lay the groundwork for long-term impact.
In the absence of distracting office settings and stressful commutes, many employees have thrived in this period of social distancing, maintaining or even increasing their productivity while working from home. Quickly seeing the benefits of contributing to the well-being of their staff, some companies have taken it a step further—shortening the work week from five days to four.
Education leaders have spent the summer planning for the start of the academic year, working hard to find the safest, most sustainable path forward for students, teachers, administrative staff, and their families. While the moment may feel chaotic and uncertain, it may turn out to be a trial-run for new approaches to learning and the systems that facilitate it.
Despite cultural, social and economic differences, countries can learn a lot from each other, especially in the middle of a global crisis that knows no bounds. Karabi Acharya, director of the Global Ideas for US Solutions portfolio at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, explores how we can learn new ideas and solutions from other countries as we navigate this new normal together.
Imaginable Futures, a global philanthropic investment firm, recently joined forces with design and consulting firm IDEO, to release a report on the impact of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement on our education systems. They used tools like design fiction and futuring to imagine scenarios and outcomes that can help us plan for what’s to come.
When budgets get tight, funding for the arts is often the first to get cut. The economic downturn caused by COVID-19 has been no exception. In response, members of the arts sector are reimagining how artists and arts institutions sustain themselves. By focusing on broad coalition-building and advocacy, collectives like Artist Relief are hoping to pave the way for a more resilient and empowered future.
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Check out our other Curated Resources such as 7 Ways to Be Antiracist through Design and Communications and 7 Innovative Fundraising Strategies for Uncertain Times.
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The last several months have been a wake-up call for those of us who want to see justice for Black, Indigenous, and people of color. It’s no longer enough to voice support for these communities, we need to take action to overhaul the racist systems and policies around us. Like many others, we’ve been exploring the specific actions we can take, internally and externally, to be proactively antiracist in what we do and how we do it.
As designers, storytellers, and strategists, we believe communications can play a powerful role in moving towards becoming antiracist. In this piece, we’re sharing ideas, strategies, and perspectives that help communicators and designers advance more productive conversations about racism and social inequality. While the policies and actions organizations take to be definitively antiracist may look different for all of us, we hope these ideas will help your own efforts to chart a new path forward.
Organizations working to fight inequality and injustice need to describe the communities they serve. But framing these groups with the challenges they face rather than the assets they possess can reinforce harmful stereotypes and undermine an organization’s actual mission. The practice of doing this well is known as “asset framing.” Trabian Shorters, founder of BMe Community, explains the what and why.
Speaking of framing, stories rely on characters to help readers relate to a topic. Typically, we think of these characters as individuals who demonstrate the impact of a nonprofit’s work or the nature of a problem. But when we make systems a primary character in social impact stories, they become a more powerful tool for challenging assumptions and inspiring action. Susan Nall Bales, founder of the FrameWorks Institute, makes the case for explanatory storytelling. to help tell a more complete story that helps us understand complex systems and the roles they play in shaping social issues.
For nonprofit communicators, words matter—especially for organizations working across cultures, ethnicities, or any other groups requiring inclusive language. Drawing from research about the cultural, political and linguistic meanings of words, the Diversity Style Guide offers guidance and context for how to use them.
Experiences are just as important as language for building an inclusive nonprofit brand. A new feature on LinkedIn offers a great example of a change that better serves their growing multicultural audience: users will soon be able to add a recording of the pronunciation of their names to their profiles.
Companies like Microsoft have a responsibility to stay at the forefront of progressive design and technology, especially when their products and services are used across cultures and borders. Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Guide offers insights, toolkits, and activities that anyone can use to make their work more inclusive.
Acknowledging the need for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is an important first step, but affecting real change in your organization can often feel daunting at best. These 7 practical ideas published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review can help make equality at your nonprofit a practice—not just a conversation.
The world around us is filled with products and experiences that have been designed with certain needs in mind. And while design impacts everyone, design decisions are often made without considering the diverse needs and perspectives of the people they affect. Design Justice Network seeks to rethink the design process with a set of principles that place people who have been marginalized by design directly at its center.
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Check out our other Curated Resources such as 7 Innovative Fundraising Strategies for Uncertain Times and 7 Resources for Navigating the Coronavirus Pandemic.
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As social distancing continues and society is slowly finding its footing in the pandemic, many people are moving from crisis response mode to proactively planning for the future. What does this new normal mean for nonprofits, and specifically, for fundraising?
It may sound cliché, but the bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity—and we’re seeing nonprofits innovate with fundraising strategies and techniques to overcome the uncertainty and instability that this pandemic has brought with it.
So, in this piece, we’re sharing seven ideas that shine a spotlight on what fundraisers are thinking about right now and how they’re approaching these unprecedented times. While the shift from panic to progress may look different for every organization, we’ve noticed some common themes emerge in how fundraisers are elevating the relevance of their brands. It may not make the situation any less overwhelming, but hopefully these ideas will be helpful as you chart a new path forward.
With COVID-19 and social distancing mandates in place indefinitely, many nonprofits who rely on fundraising events had to look beyond postponing. Fundraising Expert Chris Cloud explores the pros and cons of “Plan C,” transforming in-person events into virtual events.
For organizations working toward deep systemic change, the perspectives and programs they cultivate can be uncomfortable for some donors, limiting their funding opportunities. Harlem’s Brotherhood/Sister Sol found ways to diversify their base of support, doubling their revenue in just five years.
Social distancing has severely limited how nonprofits engage with their donors. But by taking a holistic approach to their digital strategies—optimizing their donation pages for mobile and ensuring donate links are readily available on their platforms—organizations can still engage in meaningful ways.
If crafting the right fundraising messages felt challenging before, that feeling has likely only intensified. But nonprofit communicators shouldn’t let fear prevent them from communicating with their donors. As Bloomerang points out, there’s no rulebook for fundraising in a pandemic.
Nonprofits who once relied on peer-to-peer fundraising events like walks and bike rides have had to make a sharp pivot to virtual fundraising. It may be too soon to tell how effective they’ve been, but many are proving that it’s certainly possible—and that the same fundraising principles still hold true.
The economic downturn triggered by the coronavirus has left many donors reassessing their charitable giving. In making decisions about where they put their support in this time, donors are looking for organizations who can provide transparency about how they’ve been impacted and a plan for moving forward.
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed weaknesses within the nonprofit sector that perhaps have been hiding in plain sight. Some leaders in the nonprofit community see a direct correlation between the quick financial collapse of so many organizations and a sector-wide tradition of discouraging them from building cash reserves.
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Check out our other Curated Resources such as 7 Resources for Navigating the Coronavirus Pandemic.
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In a world plagued with the coronavirus, it seems like both everything and nothing has changed, all at once. Each new day brings new developments, new challenges to overcome, and new lessons in how we collaborate and communicate.
While nothing about this has been normal, there’s one thing that rings as true today as it always has been, and that’s the value of partnerships. At Constructive, we’re committed to finding new ways to continue supporting our brand community—whether we’ve worked together in the past, are collaborating on a project today, or are just partners in spirit.
Constructively Curated will be our way of sharing the very best of the many ideas, resources, and perspectives from voices we trust that our team finds every day while doing the work we love. At the risk of offering one more coronavirus-related compilation, we’re sharing seven important items that can help nonprofits navigate these confusing, uncharted waters.
We hope they are both useful and inspire your thinking. And if there’s anything more we can do to support you through this challenging time, we hope you’ll reach out.
As the coronavirus has intensified, nonprofit communicators have had to turn on a dime to adapt their messaging. So the Communications Network created the Coronavirus Crisis Comms Triage Kit, crowdsourcing best practices and resources for the nonprofit sector.
The coronavirus ground the economy to a halt, leaving organizations across all sectors without critical income streams. If you’re in need of funding but don’t know where to start, Candid.org compiles funds created specifically for those impacted by the pandemic.
It’s normal for nonprofit professionals to wear many different hats, but adding fluency in legalese to the mix is a big lift. Thankfully, Nonprofit New York and the National Council of Nonprofits deconstructed the CARES Act and how it impacts nonprofits, so you don’t have to.
Social distancing has cancelled nearly all in-person fundraising events for the foreseeable future, cutting off vital sources of income for nonprofits. CauseVox offers some creative ways to adapt in-person event strategies for digital platforms like Zoom and Instagram.
In addition to social distancing, one simple but powerful thing we can all do to help flatten the curve is join forces behind the health and medical experts most qualified to lead us through this crisis. Philanthropy details steps we can take to help amplify their messages.
There is rarely a one size fits all approach to nonprofit fundraising and communications, especially in the aftermath of a global public health crisis. Inside Philanthropy shares how select organizations and sectors are forging ahead and preparing for what happens next.
Lessons Learned
How might nonprofits learn from those who have endured similar extended crises in the past? Nonprofit Quarterly compiles tips for not just surviving but thriving, now and in the future, from nonprofits who have demonstrated resilience in the past.
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