JOURNAL
How can communications signal trust?
I am interested in the way that nonprofits evolve over time, the phases they go through along that evolution, their attitudes toward communications, and how those attitudes influence their advancement. In an effort to deepen my understanding and to recognize and connect patterns, I have an ongoing practice of studying the communications of individual nonprofits.
This is how I do it: When someone tells me about a nonprofit, I add it to a list. Once a week I dig deep into one nonprofit from the list, reviewing any publicly available materials associated with the organization. This typically includes their web and social presence and can extend to impact reports, sub-brand programs, email newsletters, campaigns or initiatives, press, events, and anything that comes up in an internet search.
Through this research process, a pattern I have recognized is that some nonprofits immediately feel trustworthy. There is something about these organizations that demonstrates they know what they’re doing, in a way that comes across almost subconsciously. Conversely, other organizations lack that trustworthy quality.
I have observed this pattern enough to confidently say that it goes beyond vibes. These are some of the specific markers I have observed that make an organization feel trustworthy from the first encounter:
Information availability
Does a nonprofit’s materials answer basic questions like who they serve, how they do it, and how to support them?Information clarity
A day after researching a new nonprofit, If I had to describe that organization in a single sentence, could I do it?Information transparency
Are they clear about their leadership and sources of funding/support?Visual cohesion
Do all of the visual communications feel like they come from the same organization? Are the colors, fonts, and logos consistent?Visual accessibility
Are their materials easy to read, across media formats, and are they accessible by screen readers?Technical quality
Are photos and publications high-resolution, and do they render properly?Visual specificity
Do the communications feel unique to the organization, or could they belong to anyone?
No single marker from this list indicates whether an organization is trustworthy. However, when viewed holistically, they can provide an idea of how quickly someone understands (and trusts) an organization. They also provide a useful diagnostic tool. When one or more of these markers is missing, it can offer insight into which areas of the organization’s communications could be strengthened.
As I continue this research, I expect this framework to evolve alongside it. Each nonprofit I study adds another data point, and raises new questions about effective nonprofit communication, how to build trust with stakeholders, and the role that communications play in organizational advancement.
The foundation of a scalable communications team
You’ll know when it’s time to scale your team. But what’s the best way to do it?
Nonprofit communications departments tend to grow along a predictable path. As the organization matures, the workload that was carried by one person expands until it’s no longer practical for the department to be run by a single person.
The instinctive next step is to add a second or supporting role to the department.
But I would argue that before adding a new role to the department, organizations should first invest in documenting their brand and creating the tools that allow future team members to succeed.
Scaling means more than increasing your headcount.
A communications department of one can rely on one person’s memory. A communications department of two cannot.
When one person is responsible for communications, a lot of the organization’s knowledge lives in their head. They know which logo to use, where the files are stored, how the organization talks about itself, and how communications pieces should come together.
As the team grows, that knowledge needs to become accessible to others.
Build the brand before you build the team.
Investing in your brand and documenting it before hiring for a second role can help your team:
Define brand rules before trying to teach them to new people. If the visual identity or brand hierarchy are unclear when you scale the department, that lack of clarity will scale along with it.
Achieve consistency regardless of tenure. When everyone works from the same visual and messaging foundation, communications become more consistent—even when someone has just joined the team.
Reduce reliance on unintentional gatekeepers. Instead of one person acting as the keeper of the brand, the information is externalized, accessible to every team member through guidelines, templates, and a library of approved assets
Reduce time spent onboarding. When the head of the department has tools that help educate new hires about the brand quickly and efficiently, they have increased capacity for other things.
An investment that continues paying dividends as your team grows.
Improving brand clarity at the foundational level prevents ambiguity from being replicated as the team grows.
Increasing brand consistency deepens trust and credibility with stakeholders.
Replacing unintentional gatekeepers with central documentation increases the team’s efficiency.
And increasing the department head’s overall capacity allows them to spend more time on strategy and execution.
This is how communications teams scale.
Making an investment in brand documentation and other tools is a multiplier for your communications capacity because it creates a shared understanding and foundation for team members. It enables more work to be done, more consistently, and lets your department leader spend more time looking ahead.
Growth replicates what already exists.
The key is making the investment at the right time. Invest in your brand before you grow your communications team because whatever state your brand is in when you scale your team is the state you’re going to replicate.
My vision for effective nonprofit communications
Nonprofit communication challenges are recurring, systemic problems that can be solved through systemic solutions.
The same challenges, repeated
All nonprofits face similar communication challenges at some point on their journey from idea to established.
Common challenges include:
DIY and piecemeal design decisions add up into a confusing visual identity.
Institutional knowledge is lost with employee turnover.
The mission changes over time and the brand no longer feels like an accurate representation of the organization.
Every communication piece starts from scratch and time is wasted searching for the right files and photos.
And this is just the start of the list.
As a nonprofit leader you might find it comforting to know that every communications problem you’ve faced has also been faced by legions before you, and will be faced by legions behind you, spanning to both horizons like an infinity mirror of frustrated mission-driven organizations.
What changes when we treat the challenges as predictable?
After years of observing these challenges and wrestling through individual solutions, I stopped asking, “How do I complete this project?” and started asking, “What would nonprofit communications look like if these challenges were solved at a systems level?” What if the lessons learned by one organization made the path easier for the next? I began to see these challenges as systemic, and therefore solvable at a systemic level.
In that vein, I have created an ambitious mission for myself to work toward a world where every nonprofit doing important work has the power to communicate effectively. This is a vision of an ecosystem that strengthens the effectiveness of nonprofit communications at scale, by continuously generating trust, talent, capacity, and a different operating standard for nonprofit communications.
Today, I am building the foundation for this ecosystem through deepening my undestanding of the issues through one-on-one brand consulting at RDG. But this is just the beginning. The ultimate goal isn't just to help one organization at a time; it’s to build the shared tools, curricula, and collective resources that make enterprise-level communication strategy accessible to every nonprofit, regardless of their budget.
Imagine a different standard
In an effort to share this specific vision, I invite you to imagine a world where:
Every time someone encounters one of your brand touchpoints–your website, physical location, annual report, or other marketing materials–their recognition, understanding, and trust of your organization deepens.
Every new communications piece starts from a strategically assembled kit of parts. Your team members know where to find the pieces they need, and how to use them.
New employees can quickly understand your organization's visual identity and communication standards without relying on a single long-time staff member to explain them.
Outside partners, designers, photographers, printers, and consultants can represent your organization accurately because the expectations are clear and documented.
Your programs and initiatives have room to express their unique character while still feeling unmistakably connected to the parent organization.
Your communications evolve alongside your organization. As your mission grows, your brand remains an accurate reflection of who you are and the communities you serve.
The quality of your communications no longer depends on who happens to be creating them. Systems, tools, and shared knowledge help maintain consistency over time.
Communication becomes easier, faster, and more effective because your team has the support, structure, and resources it needs to succeed.
This is the future we are working toward.
It is the vision that shapes my daily decisions and long-term planning at RDG. Most nonprofits will never have a large communications department or an unlimited budget. But what if they could access the right knowledge, at the right moment, to make their challenges a little more approachable? What if these predictable problems were replaced with predictable solutions that became so ingrained in the standards of operation that they went unnoticed?
Brand, brand kits, brand guidelines, and toolkits. Are these the same thing?
Branding can be a confusing world, in part because many of the terms used to describe branding services are not well-defined. Different agencies may have different definitions for a single word, and that ambiguity makes it harder to understand service proposals, make comparisons between multiple offers, or even to determine exactly what you’re looking for.
This is especially confusing for nonprofit leaders who may be making their first foray into purchasing branding services during a demanding inflection point. It’s common for nonprofits to make their first major investment in branding as part of a significant organizational change: adding a service, reaching a new audience, or redefining their public perception.
Those moments can be stressful, and it doesn’t help that some of the terms you have to sort through are used interchangeably or lack a universally accepted definition.
While we can’t standardize language used across the industry, Ravenwood Design Group can offer our own clarifying interpretation.
Brand
Your brand is the system of how you show up as an organization. This covers everything from your name, to the language you use, to your visual presentation. You can think of it as your overarching identity. It’s what people think of when they think of your organization.
Who needs it?
Any organization who wants people to recognize their existence should have a brand.
Brand Kits
A brand kit is a collection of the assets that make up your brand.
This typically includes things like your logo, color palette, fonts, and any supporting elements in your visual language such as pattern, texture, or graphics.
A brand kit can also include lexical assets like your tone of voice or specific brand language.
Who needs it?
Brands who want to build trust with stakeholders should have a brand kit. A brand kit enables organizations to create consistent visual communication, because each communication piece is constructed using the same kit of parts.
They also enable teams with limited resources to communicate faster, because having a brand kit means that your assets are organized and readily available, typically through Canva or another communications software.
Brand Guidelines
A brand guideline is a document that contains the rules for using your brand kit.
This enables your brand to reach a higher level of consistency than a brand kit alone, because it codifies not only which assets make up your brand, but how they should be applied.
This can allow teams without a dedicated designer to achieve consistency, as well as making it easier to get on-brand work from external vendors.
Who needs it?
All organizations benefit from having brand guidelines, but there are some specific situations where they are especially useful:
When multiple people, departments, or vendors are creating visual communication
When you do not have a dedicated or senior-level design professional on staff
Toolkits
If a brand kit is the assets that make up your brand, and brand guidelines are the rules for how to use those assets, a toolkit is a more limited subset of the brand, often developed to enable consistent communication around a specific, short-term use. This could be for activations such as an event or campaign. A toolkit can include both visual and language-based assets.
Just like a brand kit, a toolkit is typically developed and assembled by a professional, and organized in a way that makes it easy to access and use. The purpose is to give decentralized groups a shared starting point, ultimately leading to more consistent communication.
Who needs it?
Toolkits are most useful to established brands with communication needs around a short-term engagement such as an event or campaign, especially when a moment calls for coordination across multiple practitioners (such as vendors, advocates, or partners).
Knowing the difference
As with many aspects of branding, definitions vary from agency to agency. The exact terminology is less important than understanding the purpose each tool serves:
Your brand is the overarching system.
Your brand kit contains the assets that make up that system.
Your brand guidelines explain how those assets should be used.
A toolkit is a limited-use brand subset, often assembled to support a short-term activation.
Understanding the distinctions can help you evaluate proposals, ask better questions, and invest in the resources that best support your organization's communication goals.
What makes a brand functional?
And how do you know if yours fits the definition?
A functional brand is one that communicates accurately, can be applied consistently, and stands out within its category. The measure of a brand’s functionality is a balance between consistency and flexibility. It needs to be consistent enough to be recognizable, but flexible enough to work across channels. The ideal brand is built as a system that can scale, so that future growth fits into the system without requiring a complete overhaul.
If that description feels overwhelming, there’s good news: These are all characteristics that can be tested, predicted, and improved, even before a brand launches.
How are dysfunctional brands created?
Brand designers don’t always have to work inside the brands they create and that can give them a skewed perspective of what a brand really needs. They can make “Bluesky” design decisions about the brand and never have to reconcile those decisions with actual application needs. Examples of this include things like creating a color palette that lacks color combinations that meet minimum contrast requirements for legibility, or recommending brand colors that fall outside the gamut of standard printing.
Evaluating Brand Function
So how do you know if a brand will be functional when it moves out of the hypothetical world of brand design and into the real world of brand application?
To answer this question, Ravenwood Design Group has developed a series of diagnostic tests that we use to begin every new brand engagement. This diagnostic phase allows us to evaluate a brand’s functionality so that it can be strengthened before a significant investment is made in traditional design work.
The diagnostic results in a report that answers questions, identifies opportunities, diagnoses needs, and provides a recommendation on where and how to strengthen a brand’s function. Going through this process with a brand before any traditional work starts enables these issues to be addressed on a systemic level, and encoded into the brand moving forward. In a practical sense it means that if we identify and solve issues in the brand now, the next 5 designers you hire won’t have to waste time addressing the same problem again and again. Your brand gets stronger and your team moves faster.
What We Test
The list below gives an overview of the categories explored in the diagnostic framework. These are questions that evaluate a brand’s ability to survive the demands of real-world application.
Clarity
Is the category accurately communicated?
Does the brand align visually with its positioning?
Are there any gaps in perception between the brand and its audience?
Distinction
How recognizable is the brand, especially within its category?
Is there a definable brand language?
Can the brand be recalled easily?
Can the brand be described in simple terms?
System Integrity
Is the brand applied the same way across mediums?
Does it maintain integrity across scale?
Are the brand assets cohesive and well-defined?
Practical concerns
Do the brand colors enable legible contrast combinations?
Are the fonts legible across a variety of scales and rendering methods?
Can the colors be accurately reproduced across production methods?
Growth
Does the brand architecture strategically facilitate expansion?
Is the color palette comprehensive enough to work for the brand’s next chapter?
Does the toolkit contain enough variety to support a brand that’s larger than it is today?
Usability
Are the brand guidelines easy to understand and follow?
Are new applications easy to imagine?
Is it clear how to develop new on-brand assets such as photography?
Are the brand assets easy for relevant team members to locate and use?
Synthesizing the Results
Each of these questions can uncover insights about a brand’s functionality, and taken together those insights can inform how we move a brand from being something that looks nice as a concept, to something that is functional in practice: easy for audiences to understand, easy for your team to use, and built to withstand future growth.
This process is core to the work we do, and if you’d like to learn more or see a demonstration please get in touch.
The false economy of DIY for nonprofits
“This seems simple enough, can we do it internally?” If you’re part of a nonprofit communications team, that’s a question you have likely asked yourself many times when working with a consultant or freelancer.
You’re constantly looking for ways to conserve resources and find efficiencies, and sometimes it feels silly to spend the limited resources you have on things that look easy.
This was the exact situation that one of my clients found themself in this week. They have an event logo that needs the year updated on an annual basis. It feels inefficient to make this request to a designer year after year, and on paper it looks like a project where they could cut costs by doing the work themselves. They asked me for a working file in InDesign so they could handle this update moving forward.
I always want to empower my clients to have ownership over their design work, so this would normally be a simple “Yes!” However, as I was thinking through the logistics of handing this work back to them, a particular anecdote came to mind:
A man receives a quote from a contractor to build a cabinet for him. He believes the quote is high, and decides to build the cabinet himself. He ends up investing extra time in research, extra money on specialized tools, and ultimately ends up spending the same amount as the contractor quoted him, for a poorly made cabinet.
When it comes to design, how can nonprofits avoid falling into the same trap?
When to DIY and when to Delegate?
Most nonprofits have restricted budgets for creative and that includes creative software. As a result they may be selective about their subscriptions, perhaps limiting themselves to a single Adobe program instead of the entire suite.
In my client’s case they only had a subscription for InDesign, in order to take on production of some of their more text-heavy projects like annual reports.
The request was logical: if InDesign can be used to edit text, why can’t it be used to update the text in a logo?
The answer was more complicated.
A communications staff member might be familiar with how to use Adobe programs, but there’s another level of thinking that comes first: deciding which program is right based on your technical needs. InDesign can be used to update text, yes, but it cannot be used to export a logo file that is scaleable, or a logo file with a transparent background. Those are necessary but technical details that a person without expertise may miss, resulting in time spent going down the wrong road.
This is grossly simplifying things, but as a rule of thumb, if you’re missing either:
Awareness of which program you need
The program you need
Then outsourcing is probably the right decision.
If you’re still worried about the expense, think of it this way: Would you rather invest in a year-long subscription to a program you’re not an expert in, or an hour of design time from a professional? It may take a professional less time to execute your task than it would take you to research it.
An outside-the-box solution
So how did we solve this problem together? My client ultimately invested in a small amount of design time in order to create the annual event logos for the next ten years. Now the assets are on-hand when they’re needed, and my client doesn’t feel silly or waste admin time making the same simple request every year.
2025 in Review
A lot happened this year and in an effort to share more of my work, I am taking some time to catalog it.
Although I have been in this industry for more than a decade, this is the first year I have operated as “Ravenwood Design Group” and put real thought into what that means. In the past, I haven’t had a clean answer when people asked what I did. The honest answer was usually “a little bit of everything.” That wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t very helpful.
Choosing a focus for my practice is something I have been circling for my entire professional career. Up until now, I have had a fear that it will mean closing doors or missing opportunities. What I have found instead is that it means becoming a beacon– it’s easier for the organizations who need the type of work I do to find me, because for the first time I can clearly state what that work is: I help nonprofits show up as credible and cohesive so they can face key moments with confidence. Going deeper into this focus allows me to provide an increasing level of expertise in the work, and enables me to apply that expertise to more complex and consequential projects.
This year has been full of personal and professional challenges, and an equal number of personal and professional joys. I have worked with new and longtime partners on projects with real impact, deepening the library of tools and experiences that I bring to my practice. I have practiced talking about what I do, and sharing it with more people. And I have begun turning years of generalist experience into a more focused, repeatable practice.
I am thankful for the clients and collaborators that I had the honor of working with this past year, and can’t wait to share some of the things we have in store for 2026.
When should a nonprofit translate its logo into another language?
Translating a nonprofit’s logo into another language is not a purely technical task. It is a strategic decision that carries real implications for identity, trust, and expectations. A logo functions as a proper name and a signal of authority. Changing its language can subtly, but meaningfully, change how an organization is perceived and what audiences believe it offers.
In most cases, nonprofits should not translate their core logo for everyday use. Consistency is one of the primary jobs of a logo. Introducing multiple language versions can create confusion about whether the organization is the same entity, a separate program, or a different system altogether.
The clearest case for translating a logo is when the organization, program, or system is designed specifically for speakers of another language. In those situations, translation improves clarity and access, and the translated mark accurately reflects the experience a constituent can expect. When that alignment is not present, translation can unintentionally signal broader language access than actually exists, which can erode trust.
There are limited exceptions where translation may make sense. These include cases where the original name is offensive, misleading, or meaningless in another language, or where a translated name is already widely used and well understood by the intended audience. These scenarios are the exception, not the rule.
More often, inclusion is better achieved through multilingual communication design, rather than logo translation. Best practices from multilingual public systems—such as transportation signage—emphasize equal visual treatment of languages: parallel placement, equal hierarchy, and consistent typography. This approach prioritizes access to information without fragmenting brand identity.
For example, we recently received an inquiry about translating a logo into Spanish. The underlying goal was inclusion, but the organization did not offer all services in Spanish. In cases like this, translating the logo itself could create expectations that the organization cannot fully meet.
Instead, nonprofits serving multilingual communities often benefit from one of three approaches:
Single materials that present two languages with equal visual weight.
Separate materials for each language, designed in parallel.
Audience-specific collateral designed around the services actually offered in that language.
In short, translating a logo should be a considered exception, not a default. Thoughtful multilingual design can expand access while preserving clarity, consistency, and honesty about what an organization does, and does not, provide.