Branding Strategy What Listening Taught Us About Nonprofit Communications Strategy Mohamed Hamad August 31, 2026 » Blog » What Listening Taught Us About Nonprofit Communications Strategy Table of Contents The client already knew how to step back New language can exclude the very people it's meant to include Language that doesn't change behind closed doors Respect looked like honesty, not comfort Sometimes the song isn't about you Marketing runs on getting attention. Say the right thing, loudly enough, in the right place, and people notice you. Most days, that’s the job. A recent communications strategy project reminded me it isn’t always the job. We were helping a youth-focused foundation figure out how to talk about its own work, and the sharpest lessons from that process weren’t things we taught the client. They were things we learned by listening closely to how the client’s own team already talked about themselves. The client already knew how to step back Early in the project, in a working session about storytelling structure, we asked the team a standard craft question: who is the hero in this story? It’s meant to get people thinking about protagonist and audience. The team didn’t need to think about it. The answer came back immediately and without qualification: the young people the foundation funds are always the hero, and the foundation belongs in the background, in the same sentence, not centered above it. We’d asked a question about narrative structure and gotten back a values statement, already fully formed. The same instinct showed up when the team reviewed its own draft messaging. They pushed back on the word “empowered,” reasoning that power isn’t really the foundation’s to give, the people it funds already have it. They preferred language like “self-empowered,” “feel seen,” “taken seriously,” or “amplifying their voices,” phrasing that put the agency where it already belonged instead of implying the foundation was the source of it. Neither correction came from us. Our job was to notice both moments and carry them into the messaging strategy, not to introduce the idea that the foundation should step back. The team had already arrived there, on its own, before we walked in the door. New language can exclude the very people it’s meant to include Words matter, and a lot of new terminology has emerged over the last couple of decades meant to decolonize, to be more empathetic, to better name communities that have been marginalized by systems and by language. Most of it comes from a real place. But a term invented to be inclusive can do the opposite when the people it describes were never asked whether it fits. Words like “BIPOC,” “racialized,” or “safe spaces” can read as othering to the exact communities they’re meant to speak for, not because the intent was wrong, but because the term wasn’t built with them. The team was insistent about specificity for exactly this reason. They pushed back on treating “Black” or “Indigenous” as one undifferentiated category, and named the specific community, tradition, or nation instead, every time. A broad label, however well-meant, collapses distinct communities into one, and that collapsing is its own kind of erasure. The same reasoning produced a smaller, more specific swap: “safe spaces” became “accountable spaces,” mid-conversation, with real thinking behind the distinction. Safety framing centers the institution, its comfort, its liability. Accountability framing centers what the institution actually owes the community it serves. One word choice, and the whole sentence points somewhere else. Language that doesn’t change behind closed doors That instinct didn’t only come from inside the team. An elder the organization was in regular conversation with told them to retire a piece of funder jargon, “non-qualified donees,” not only when talking with the communities it describes, but in conversations with other funders too. The reasoning was simple: if you wouldn’t say a term to someone’s face, you shouldn’t say it about them behind closed doors either. That’s language accountability extended past the words already written down and into a habit. I’ve seen a version of this pattern on other projects too. Some organizations avoid the word “grant” itself, because to grant something implies a position of power being extended downward. Some avoid “invest,” because investment implies an expected return. Both carry the same imbalance a lot of organizations are trying to write their way out of, even when the fix is one word. Respect looked like honesty, not comfort Being honest wasn’t only about which words the team used. It also meant not managing what the young people it funds were told about where that money comes from and why the foundation focuses on the specific communities it does. The team described the work in terms of redistributing wealth rather than offering charity. One team member’s reasoning stayed with me: deciding “you only need to know what you need to know because you’re young” is its own kind of paternalism. Being transparent instead, even about something as uncomfortable as where the money originates, was itself a form of respect. The team also pushed back on how the sector talks about burnout, reframing it away from an individual failing and toward a structural one, a kind of passion tax the sector extracts from people assumed to work hard because they care, without ever being asked whether they’re paid enough. That reframe shaped how the strategy talked about the people the foundation supports, without language that quietly blamed them for exhaustion a whole system had caused. Sometimes the song isn’t about you Marketing exists to get attention for something. Most of the job really is making sure people notice you. But every so often a project asks you to do the opposite: build a strategy whose whole design is making sure the attention lands somewhere other than on the organization paying for it. Carly Simon had a line for the failure mode of that: you’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you. The lesson from this project ran the other way. Sometimes, done right, the song genuinely isn’t about you, and the discipline is building a communications strategy that keeps it that way even when the org is the one signing the invoice. That’s, I think, the actual test of whether “de-centering yourself” is real or just a slogan: whether the organization was already living it before an agency showed up to write it down. If your own team already talks this way about the people you serve, that instinct is worth building real communications work around, not editing down to fit a template. Reach out if you’re in the middle of figuring out your own version of it.
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