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.

Nobody's against fixing this project, but they may be afraid of making a wrong choice along the way, or they’re struggling to figure out whether this is the thing that deserves attention before everything else.

Everything is fine. (Nothing is fine.)

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​Read the full piece below.
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Who's Paying for This?

This connects to something I keep circling back to. When "just use Canva" becomes the whole strategy, there's a cost, and it isn't paid by the team member who absorbed another task they were never hired to do. The debt shows up in inaccessible information, inconsistent communication, exhausted staff, and communities who have to work harder than they should just to get what they came for.

(More on that here and here, if you want the full argument.)

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Forward, Into the Glorious Future

Every organization has a list of things they'd like to improve. A homepage that finally reflects who they are and converts, whatever that means to them. A refreshed brand identity. Better, usable templates. Accessibility that meets compliance standards. Workable systems. Any sort of consistency. Those are all worthwhile investments, and sooner or later most organizations will need some combination of them.

The harder question is where to begin.

A friend and terrific book coach, Dinah LaPrairie, said something to me recently: "Forward motion begins with motion. When you start pedalling a bicycle, you don't go in a straight line right away. There's a moment when you have to adjust the steering and add pressure to the pedals."

I’ve bookmarked that idea because organizations often assume their first marketing decision has to be the perfect one. But we can all understand this need to orient yourself, adjust, apply pressure in the right moments. We all have our reasons for clinging to perfection (it’s me, hi), but any good therapist—I mean business coach—would assure us that’s a trap. Your next step doesn't need to be perfect. It does have to create enough momentum that the next decision becomes easier.

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The question I ask is rarely "what looks outdated?" It's "where are people being excluded?"

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Asking this instead tends to surface the more critical problem, not just the obvious one.

Inclusive Design is the lens I use whenever someone asks me where to start. I work backwards from the people the organization exists to serve and ask whether they can actually find what they need, understand what they're reading, and complete the task they came to do.

Sometimes an audit reveals a website that doesn't work with a screen reader. Sometimes it's a donation form that falls apart on mobile. Sometimes it's a colour palette that fails contrast standards, or typography that's beautiful in a brand presentation but exhausting to read. Sometimes it's something less visible: a communications team carrying design work they were never staffed or trained to do, which means the people those communications are meant to reach are getting something that was made under duress, by the wrong person, with the wrong tools.

Viewed through that lens, prioritising gets much easier.

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​Looking for the point where a thoughtful design decision removes the most friction for the greatest number of people is your next right step.

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If your collateral lacks consistency, start with your visual identity.

Does every report feel like it came from a different organization? Do staff make design choices on the fly every time they open Canva? Does nobody know which logo file they're supposed to use?

A visual identity gives your team a shared set of decisions they can feel confident about. At minimum, a logo, a colour palette, and typography, packaged into a simple style guide that empowers your team to make good decisions by default. It looks better, certainly, but more importantly it reduces friction for everyone trying to do the work, including the communities trying to trust you.

People may not consciously score your visual identity. They will notice when every interaction feels disjointed. Trust erodes in tiny moments like that.

Sometimes creating a new identity is necessary, because what you have isn’t serving you or your people. Sometimes it doesn’t have to start from scratch.

If you already have a visual identity that's living in a folder nobody opens, or you're too close to the work to see where things have drifted, a Brand Audit is the right place to start. It’s an honest look at everything you're putting into the world, and whether any of it holds together.

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If staff are rebuilding assets every week, start with your systems.

The social media template exists, but nobody can find it. The newsletter goes out looking different every month, assembled from scratch each time. Everybody’s got their own workaround. It reads unprofessional because it is, and it's costing you authority. Every campaign starts with a few minutes of hunting for the right pieces before anyone does the work they were actually hired to do.

A properly built Canva Brand Kit makes your visual identity the default inside the tool your team already uses. Your colours, fonts, logos, and templates live where people need them, which means consistency stops depending on memory or good intentions. This is capacity work as much as it is design work, and for a small team it's often one of the highest-leverage investments you can make.

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If people can't find what they came for, start with your website.

That may mean a handful of targeted changes.

It may mean a full redesign.

The work starts by asking better questions.

Can someone find your primary service in under thirty seconds? Complete a form from their phone? Navigate your site using a keyboard? Read your content without struggling through tiny type or low contrast?

Sometimes the barriers are surprisingly contained. That's exactly what a Website Accessibility Audit is designed to uncover: a content hierarchy that buries what people came for, forms that break on mobile, navigation a screen reader can't interpret, or colour palettes that fail accessibility standards.

Those issues can often be fixed without rebuilding everything.

Sometimes the audit reveals structural problems instead.

The website reflects how the organization works, not how people look for information. Every improvement creates another workaround.

That's when I recommend Website Design or Redesign. When the problems are structural, the solution is rethinking how the site is organized, how people move through it, and whether it still supports the organization you've become.

Those answers tell you where your digital presence isn’t serving you: whether the fix is a Website Accessibility Audit, a handful of targeted improvements, or the opportunity to build something that serves your community better for the next several years.

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If people are saying yes but not completing the action, start with the journey.

People visit the site. They begin a donation. They open the volunteer application. They read about a program.

Then they disappear.

A User Journey Audit follows the path a donor, volunteer, or program participant would actually take—from landing on your website through to completing an action—and finds everywhere it breaks down. The path to yes should be obvious, and sometimes the problem is surprisingly small. A confusing button label. A form asking for information that doesn't matter. A page that prioritises the organization before it tends to the visitors.

These feel like innocuous blips, but they ask every person who comes through to do a little more work than they expected.

Most nonprofits don't need to fix everything about their marketing.

They need to identify the next right thing to fix.

The homepage is visible. A logo is visible. The places where people struggle are often much less obvious, especially once staff have spent years building workarounds around them. That's why I start with inclusion instead of aesthetics. It gives us a way to decide what deserves attention first, and it usually leads to better design decisions across the board.

Sometimes the answer is a redesign. I love redesign projects because they create the opportunity to rethink systems, accessibility, messaging, and visual identity together. Sometimes the redesign comes later, after you've removed the barriers that were getting in everyone's way from the beginning.

Either way, the goal is the same: make the next decision the next right one.

The best design projects don't begin with colours or wireframes.

They begin with a better question.

If you're trying to figure out where to start, I'd love to have that conversation.

Where to Start

Rooting you on,
Reesa

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P.S. If this resonated with you, here are three ways you can let me know:

• Reply and say hello—I read every one.
• Forward this to someone who needs to hear it.
• Bring me in as a design partner when your team needs someone who actually gets it.

About Reesa​
I work with nonprofits and social enterprises on accessibility-focused branding and websites, helping make sure your marketing shows how your message matters™. Member of the Association of Registered Graphic Designers of Canada. Parent of small humans, vernacular jazz dancer, weightlifter, and unreasonably attached to a sourdough starter named Pudding.