Marketing for Non-Profits: Building a Communications Ecosystem on a Small Budget

Most small nonprofit communications teams are already doing the work: social posts, a newsletter, the occasional flyer, outreach templates. The piece usually missing is a system that connects all of it.
This session, Part 1 of CHSSN’s new community workshop series, walks through that system: how to set a strategy your team can stick to, keep one voice across every channel, build a visual identity on a real nonprofit budget, and measure what your funders actually care about.

What You’ll Learn

• Strategy vs. tactics: Strategy is the bigger objective. Tactics are the individual channels and activities inside it, like a podcast, a newsletter, or a social account. Learn how to tell the two apart, and how to set goals sized to your team’s real capacity, including the seasonal dips reporting season brings.
• Voice & tone: One organizational voice, flexed across social media, email, web copy, and board or funder reports, so a casual social post never leaks into a formal report, or the reverse.
• Visual identity on a budget: Free tools like Canva’s nonprofit tier, and why one person with standing authority to say “this is on-brand” matters more than a design department.
• Execution across channels: The same identity, different rules per channel: what changes between a social post, an email, a web page, and a funder report, and how to meet your audience on the channel they already use.
• Measuring what matters: Why follower counts don’t mean anything to a funder, and what to track instead.