For nonprofits and social enterprises whose work runs deeper than their marketing lets on. If your team is doing it all, this is for you: accessible, practical, occasionally weird monthly dispatches featuring accessibility-focused design ideas and fixes. Stuff you can use now, freebies when I've got them, and the occasional rant about the sector's bad habits. So the communities you serve can actually see themselves in your mission, and engage.
Just because someone can do it doesn't mean they should
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Hey Reader, You know that moment in school when the teacher is looking to call on someone and you quickly avert your eyes? In the social sector, design work has a way of looking like it fell on the desk of whoever didn't look away in time. They weren't quite prepared, and their brain definitely wants to be somewhere else. Still, the need is real, the deadline is looming, the tools to make it happen exist, and someone is close enough to it to push some pixels around. So something gets made, and the problem feels handled. And yet! Handled and solved are not the same thing. The gap between handled and solved tends to show up later, in ways that are hard to trace back to that frantic scramble of a Tuesday afternoon decision made under deadline pressure. Keeping Up With Tasks Is Not a Design StrategyJust like a Canva subscription doesn't make you a designer, keeping up with tasks is not a design strategy. While you're focused on crossing something off your list, the thinking, the intention, and the expertise that make design actually work for your audience aren't happening. The right help in the right placeTargeted design support protects the work your comms person is actually there to do, instead of saddling them with something that isn't quiiiiite where their attention should be. The idea that bringing in the right expertise is somehow indulgent says more about how nonprofits have been conditioned to operate than it does about what good work actually requires. Something as contained as a properly built Canva Brand Kit—I've set these up for clients who were tired of starting from scratch and making wild guesses every campaign—gives a team a solid foundation without requiring a massive engagement or a months-long process. And imagine unburdening a whole team's mental load! The right help, in the right place, is usually smaller than people expect. Rooting you on, Just one resource today:
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About Reesa |
Good Thing Going
For nonprofits and social enterprises whose work runs deeper than their marketing lets on. If your team is doing it all, this is for you: accessible, practical, occasionally weird monthly dispatches featuring accessibility-focused design ideas and fixes. Stuff you can use now, freebies when I've got them, and the occasional rant about the sector's bad habits. So the communities you serve can actually see themselves in your mission, and engage.
There's a project every organization has and nobody wants to start. Starting means choosing one problem over five others, spending money you're not sure you can justify, and hoping you've picked the thing that will actually make a difference. Sound familiar? The website has been "good enough" for three years. The donation form works, technically, if you have the patience of someone who really, really wants to give you money. The brand works for funders but it doesn’t speak to your community....
Hi Reader, Once, I was handed a slide deck. A marketer at an agency had built it in Canva as reference material for the brand audit package I was putting together. It was tidy enough. It also could have belonged to anyone, and in a way it did. Even though the colours had been swapped out, the fonts adjusted, the content dropped in, something was missing. The thinking that makes design actually work for a specific organization, a specific community, a specific message, wasn't there. It...
Hi Reader, Who's really paying for the fixes you keep postponing? I was reviewing a donation flow for an organization doing genuinely important work when I discovered who was really paying for the fixes they'd been postponing. Imagine yourself in this donor's position: would you jump through all the hoops, or would you give up instead? The problems weren't huge individually, just default settings and assumptions no one questioned. Compounded, they turned what should have been simple into...