JOURNAL
Typographic terms to level-up your nonprofit communications
The world of typography can be very intimidating.
Achieving professional-level typesetting skills can take years of practice, and practice can be discouraging. I still remember my first messy forays into typesetting in the early years of design school, and the subsequent years of slow improvement. It’s a skill that requires a trained eye, and a mindset of constant learning.
At the same time, typography is one of the most important tools for establishing trust through design– there are certain visual standards that we take for granted, but which can shape the way we perceive the world. Everyone knows that a brand using comic sans feels less serious than one using Times New Roman, but sometimes the smaller details of typography, such as unnoticed tweaks for legibility, can also affect our perception. If the way you do anything is the way you do everything, strong typography is an effective way to demonstrate that you know what you’re doing.
So without dedicating years of study, how can an internal communications team achieve professional-looking typography?
Through my observational research of nonprofit visual communication, I have identified several key typographic practices that have an outsize impact on the way that typography feels to an observer.
If you don’t have time to study and practice applying every typographic term, try to focus on just these. Below I am providing definitions of these key terms, and tips for how to bring that extra level of professional polish to your communications.
Paragraph Alignment
There are four ways to align the text in a paragraph, which you are likely familiar with.
Left-aligned is the primary way that type is set in the US.
Center-aligned can sometimes be used for formal typesetting, such as in invitations, schedules, and programs.
Right-aligned is a less common alternative with limited uses, typically based on visual design
Justified alignment is the last type of alignment, which typically spans the full-width of a column. Justified type creates consistent line lengths, but unless it is done by a professional, the result can look messy due to rivers.
PRO-TIP:
Use left-aligned paragraphs for most or all of your communications– it's the easiest way to achieve professional-looking typesetting if you are not a professional. Reserve center-aligned text for formal uses, or very short items.
Rivers
These are the unusually shaped negative spaces created by justifying your text in a design program. They look like "rivers" running through your paragraphs, which is where the name comes from. These spaces are created by the mathematical alignment of the words.
PRO-TIP:
Never justify text unless you have complete control over how the spacing looks. Text on websites is dynamic– individual users can control their settings, such as the display size. Responsive formatting can change line-breaks between desktop, tablet, and mobile sizes. The easiest way to achieve professional-looking typography in digital formats is to left-align your text. This will prevent rivers and maintain consistency across responsive sizes.
Typeface
A typeface is what we call a specific lettering style, such as Arial, Times New Roman, or Comic Sans. Typefaces can contain multiple weights and styles, such as light, bold, and italic. Typefaces are designed for specific uses, and work best when they are used for their intended purposes. “Typeface” has a different definition than “font”, but you can casually use the two words interchangeably and people will know what you’re talking about.
PRO-TIPS:
Use a limited number of typefaces in each communication piece, ideally sticking to ones outlined in your brand guidelines. This helps with brand recognition, information hierarchy, and consistency.
Use typefaces for their intended purpose– for example, a "display" typeface should not be used for body copy. Some typefaces are meant to be read from a distance, like as part of a display at a store, while others are designed to be read comfortably at small sizes. If you use a display typeface in a dense paragraph of text, it can cause eye strain and may even reduce comprehension.
Paragraph Styles
Paragraph styles are predefined formats for text that can be applied to whole paragraphs or groups of paragraphs. This way, you can define the settings you want once, and apply them to text throughout your document with a single click, saving time and effort in the formatting process. Instead of selecting the typeface, size, weight, color, line-height, and other settings for each instance of text, paragraph styles allow you to apply those settings to text all at once. An additional benefit of paragraph styles is that they allow you to make changes across your entire document– by updating the settings of a paragraph style, you update it across every instance of text it has been applied to. This means it’s easy to make document-wide changes to a color or font.
PRO-TIPS:
Define your styles once. At the beginning of a project, identify your information hierarchy to know how many levels of headings and body copy you will need. Then create a paragraph style for each level of typography. Look at how they communicate as a whole: are the different levels legible, and scannable? Adjust them together until you are happy with the results.
Once you have set your paragraph styles, use them across all documents. Professional-grade software like Adobe InDesign makes it easy to import paragraph styles from one document to another. Other software commonly used by nonprofits, such as Canva or Adobe Express, also allow typographic styles to be saved as part of a brand kit. Brand Guidelines are another great way to standardize your typography across communication.
A few extra pro-tips:
Space helps us separate ideas. Space around something helps us isolate it as a piece of information, which helps us process it on a subconscious level. Add extra space after a paragraph, after an item in a bulleted list, or after a heading, to make each of those things easier to read and understand.
Less is more. It’s easier to scan and understand something when it has fewer typefaces, fewer weights, and fewer type sizes. We consciously and unconsciously use headings to find our way around a document, and the typeface, weight, and size of a piece of text are all navigational cues that we are interpreting. Be intentional with your typography to help the reader better understand your text.
When in doubt, print it out. If you aren’t sure how something on screen will look once it’s printed, do a print test at 100% scale to double check it. Even better, incorporate a print test into your process whether or not you feel confident in your choices. Through looking at the printed type, you may make an unexpected design discovery.
Good communication should be accessible.
As always, my primary recommendation for significant communications pieces is to work with a professional, however my mission is to ensure that every nonprofit doing important work has the power to communicate effectively, and that includes equipping internal teams with the knowledge and confidence to execute trustworthy communication. I view this education work as part of that mission.
Communications Resources for Centers for Independent Living (CILs)
Independence First is Metro Milwaukee’s leading nonprofit resource for people with disabilities, empowering them to live independently, advocate for their rights, and fully participate in community life.
Ravenwood Design Group has had the privilege of working with Independence First over the last year, first on a program awareness campaign, and later on brand functionality, and work that equipped their internal team to communicate faster and more consistently.
Through working with Independence First over the last year, I have become more aware of accessibility needs in design, and I have also become aware of many great design resources related to disability.
This article is a compilation of my favorite resources. My hope is that these resources will be helpful to other people working on communication projects for this community. Please reach out if you have a resource to add.
Resources
Low Vision Simulator App
This application simulates symptoms of low vision vision. It can reproduce blur, glare, tunnel vision, central scotoma and nystagmus. It can also simulate complex situations such as glare and tunnel vision at the same time. It allows users to share their low-vision settings and take photos and videos during the simulation.
https://apps.apple.com/lt/app/low-vision-simulator/id6480382551
Sim Daltism
An open source color-blindness silumator. From the perspective of a color blind person, some colors are impossible to distinguish. Sim Daltonism lets you visualize colors as they are perceived with various types of color blindness. Use the camera on your iOS device, or use the Mac app to filter a region of the screen.
https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
Accessible Icon Library
A library of Accessibility Icons, available for download on Noun Project, free for everyone to use as public domain. From terms like “accessibility” and “curb-cut effect” to “mobility aid” and beyond, this collection of 25 icons celebrates accessibility and inclusive design.
https://disabilityin.org/resource/accessible-icon-library
Accessible Icon Project
The Accessible Icon Project is an ongoing work of design activism. It starts with a graphic icon, free for use in the public domain, and continues its work as a collaboration among people with disabilities and their allies toward a more accessible world.
Contrast Analyzer
A free color contrast checker to optimize your content – including text and visual elements – for individuals with color-blindness or low vision impairments.
https://vispero.com/color-contrast-checker/
Atkinson Hyperlegible® Font
A family of hyperlegible® fonts designed to improve legibility and readability for individuals with low vision. These carefully crafted fonts feature clear, highly distinctive letters and numbers that make reading easier and more accessible.
https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
Overlay fact sheet
A fact sheet explaining the limitations and risks of web accessibility overlays—tools that promise to make websites accessible through automated fixes or widgets. It explains why overlays cannot make a website fully accessible or compliant, may interfere with assistive technology, and should not replace accessibility built directly into a website.
https://overlayfactsheet.com/en/
Disabled & Here stock library
This is a disability-led effort to provide free & inclusive stock images from their own perspective, with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).
How can you achieve brand consistency without spending on a brand guide?
If the investment feels out of reach, there’s another way.
In my work with nonprofits, I often encounter misgivings from executive and communication leaders about the value of investing in a brand guide. People find it hard to justify a line item that they don’t completely understand, and I get it. The price tag can feel like an uncertain investment when you’re balancing other priorities like mission advancement, service delivery, and the million other things that small teams have to consider. When you think of a brand guide as an expensive PDF, I agree, it doesn’t make sense.
But the PDF isn’t actually the thing you’re buying when you pay for a brand guide–
you’re buying the work that goes into it.
When a professional designer creates a brand guide, they’re doing more than documenting rules and standards, they’re actually developing those things– testing color combinations and fonts for accessibility, considering logo functionality, exploring design systems until they create something with the right balance of flexibility and consistency that can enable your brand to show up online the same way it does in print, or in time-based media.
The brand guide is evidence of that work, but the work itself is the thing that is valuable.
This insight leads to an interesting train of thought for nonprofit communications teams.
If the valuable part of a brand guide is the work that goes into developing the contents
And that work can be distilled to: intentionally improving communication
And that is also the daily work of a nonprofit communications team
Then you’re already doing the work, so start documenting it!
You're already making hundreds of communication decisions on a daily basis. Instead of letting those decisions disappear, you can use what I like to call the Scrapbook Approach to Brand Guides to capture and organize the best ones. It doesn’t require a huge amount of time or effort beyond what you’re already putting in (because if you work in nonprofit communications we already know that’s a LOT of time and effort).
The idea is to approach your brand guide as a scrapbook, adding snapshots and inspiration piece by piece as you go about your daily work. Create a deck in Google Slides (or your preferred presentation software) and let it become your scrapbook.
Depending on what you put into it, it can act as a laboratory for visual experiments, a memory album to document progress and evolution, a reflecting pool to help recognize patterns, or a vision board to compile inspiration. What all of those things add up to is an investment of time spent thinking about your visual communication, and making that thinking visible so that others can be informed by it.
The Scrapbook Approach may not create a document that can replace a professionally-designed brand guide, but it is a low-cost alternative for organizations that can’t afford one. If a brand guide is on your roadmap (and I think it should be!) then the Scrapbook Approach can act as a stepping stone until you get there.
So how should you get started?
And how does this extra work fit into your already challenging workload?
The challenge in the Scrapbook Approach is finding time to do it. Fortunately, this process is specifically designed to happen in small increments. Everyone has a few moments that open up unexpectedly during the day, and if you build habits around using that time you’ll be surprised with what you can accomplish with just a couple minutes at a time. These are a few suggestions of habits to build with your spare moments.
If you have five minutes:
Make a habit of scrolling through Pinterest or Behance and start downloading design pieces that resonate with you. Drop them into your scrapbook, in a “swipe” section you can reference the next time you’re starting a layout or project.
If you have ten minutes:
Take some time to view your work through someone else’s eyes. Revisit old communication pieces and see which ones feel most trustworthy or clear. Try to identify what is different about those pieces. Take screenshots and drop them into your scrabook to reference the next time you need to design outreach materials.
If you have 30 minutes:
Scroll through your organization’s social feeds and screenshot the posts with the most engagement. Drop them onto a slide and start thinking about what they have in common visually.
If you have 45 minutes:
Look at communication materials from other organizations or companies providing the same services as you. Spend the first 30 reviewing materials from one organization, taking screenshots. Then spend the last 15 creating a slide in your scrapbook with what you have learned. By looking at your “contextual landscape” you may identify opportunities to stand out. Now you can make internal design rules to leverage those opportunities.
If you have an hour every week:
Let’s chat! I’m developing some class offerings to help nonprofit communication teams go through the same steps that I take as an agency to understand and strengthen your brand. If you’re interested in being part of my first cohort, please get in touch!
Investing Money vs Time
There are absolutely benefits to working with a professional to create your organization’s brand guide, and it will always be my top recommendation. But there’s a middle ground between having something created by an expert and having nothing at all. Small, consistent work toward documenting communication decisions can help you build toward the shared foundation that helps organizations scale. Investing in a brand guide typically represents a financial investment, while the Scrapbook Approach represents an investment in time. No matter which approach you choose, you won’t regret it.
Simple things you can do to make your brand feel more trustworthy
Even if you don’t know where to start.
Embarking on something new can feel overwhelming. They say that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. But I find myself getting caught up in the question of exactly which step that should be… As a person who struggles with perfectionism I have put a lot of thought into the ways that mindset holds me back– waiting until the perfect moment sometimes means never starting at all.
In an effort to overcome this internal obstacle, I am trying to embrace being an imperfectionist, even though it means that I frequently experience the discomfort of not having the answer, or not knowing the next step. What I do know is that chipping away at something with small actions is more effective than endlessly contemplating it and never fully deciding on that first step.
To that end, I am offering a messy guide for anyone who wants to build credibility through their visual communication, one small piece at a time. I am not suggesting that you do this all at once, but these are the things which over time will take you along the thousand mile journey toward a visual identity that feels trustworthy. I can't provide a shortcut, but I can share the map I have been creating through my research.
Make sure your logo is consistent. everywhere your logo shows up, it should have the same color, integrity, size relationship btw elements. If your logo isn’t functioning well at different scales, across mediums, or against commonly used background colors, it might be time to give that logo some attention.
Make sure your colors are consistent. Each instance of a color should be exactly the same. It seems subtle, and it is. However, this attention to detail is what communicates trust to your viewers when there’s not a person in the loop.
Make your language and content as consistent as possible. This means that every time you talk about a specific program, you’re using the same language. Yes, this means taking the time to develop that language.
Make sure your typography is legible. What am I talking about when I say typography? I’m talking about anywhere you have writing on your communications. When you’re designing a layout, literally do a print test to see what size something is going to print. Can you read it without straining? Can your grandma?
Be as specific and authentic as you can. Use language and photos that are concrete and really depict your organization. This means you can’t be vague, and you can’t use stock photography. What sets you apart? Lean into that.
View your brand through the eyes of your audience. Try to put yourself in their shoes as you read through your communications materials. What questions do you have? What is holding your interest? When do you get bored and skip over something? Take notes and then implement changes based on the notes.
Take an informal survey. Ask people what they think of when they think of your brand. What colors come to mind for them? What shapes? Ask them to tell you about your mission, specific programs, or a recent event? Their answers will help you understand what’s sticking. Are they missing something important? That’s where you need to direct your attention.
Organize your files. Take stock of all your brand assets and put them in one place. That could be photos, logos, colors, fonts, and eventually templates. Take the time to sort and label every file so you can find what you’re looking for the next time you’re in a hurry. Make sure that other people who need the assets know where to find them too.
Make one-offs into templates. Templates increase your capacity by helping reduce the work you need to do to get something off the ground. Anything can be a template if you save it in a template library! If it’s easier to execute the design element of your communication, you have more time to focus on the communication part.
Start your own brand guide. Whenever you make a design decision, take a screenshot and drop it into the presentation software of your choice. Now you have a reference for future design decisions, which you can also share with vendors and new hires to make sure that when you scale, you’re scaling consistency instead of chaos.
What makes a nonprofit mission statement effective?
This week I had a conversation with someone in a program staff role, who works for a youth-oriented nonprofit. She relayed her understanding of the organization’s mission to me and expressed frustration that the mission didn’t seem to extend to the staff in the same way that it did to the youth they serve.
In my exploration of the idea that communication constitutes an organization, this conversation had me thinking about how strong internal communication affects staff satisfaction (and therefore staff retention). When I sat down to write, I thought this was going to be about ways to embed values in internal systems.
As a natural next step, I visited the nonprofit’s website. When I got there I was surprised to see that the mission her employer listed was completely different from what she had described to me. Beyond that, I was surprised to see that the mission was 5 paragraphs long. Out of the 150+ words in the mission, only 5 of them described the program staff’s understanding of it. After seeing the mission statement myself, I was not surprised at all about the program staffer’s interpretation. A mission statement that can't produce consistent understanding isn't doing its job.
Blair Enns has a phrase I always think about when I encounter underdeveloped communications. He says that to an external audience, vagueness represents “work not done.” I would extend that idea to include memorability. If your mission statement isn’t specific, brief and memorable, then you’re leaving it open to interpretation. You haven’t done the work, and the consequence will be a lack of consistent understanding, which can contribute to things like internal frustration and mission drift.
Working on your mission means not only clarifying it, it also means optimizing it for memory and finding ways to communicate it often, at every level, both internally and externally. Missions are meant to direct an organization’s energy. But the only way that works is if they are functional enough to be remembered, and referenced clearly and often enough to become a shared understanding for people across the organization.
After my conversation with this program staffer, I propose a simple test to nonprofit leaders: The next time you are casually connecting with a program staffer or volunteer, ask if they can repeat or summarize your organization’s mission statement. The answers you get back will give you an idea of how effective your mission statement is.
Every brand system should assume someone new will inherit it.
Design principles and system design principles
When I am working on a visual design project like an annual report, there are a set of design principles that guide the work. Design principles are standard, taught in schools and known by all visual designers. They include things like balance, hierarchy, rhythm and contrast. The visual design process can require making dozens of decisions a minute, shuffling through principles to achieve a balanced layout, resizing and moving content and running through the way each decision affects the flow of information to a viewer.
But the work of communication design extends beyond individual design executions, and includes the design of systems: what are repeatable layouts that can adapt across platforms? What palette will be cohesive and flexible enough to flex with an organization as it grows? What is a process that is most likely to be adopted by a client with limited time? What process will be intuitive with the least amount of training?
One of the principles I find myself returning to when developing processes is this: Every brand system should assume someone new will inherit it.
Systems design comes into play in daily decisions for nonprofit communications
To illustrate what I mean, I’ll share an example from this week. Without going into too much technical detail, I was working on a project that required using Squarespace's blog feature as a content management system for a collection of links to external earned media stories. This is a common approach for making the most of squarespace’s built-in tools, but it creates a side effect: every entry also generates a "ghost" page within the website. Even though this collection is set up so that the title links send visitors to the original article source, the ghost page still exists within Squarespace, and there are situations where someone can land on it.
There are several ways to deal with the issue of ghost pages, and each one provides a different experience for the user while requiring a different amount of labor from the person managing the site.
The method that provides the best experience for the user involves setting up individual redirects for the ghost pages, so that even if someone lands on one, they are automatically taken to the intended destination.
However, this method requires creating a URL map for each individual ghost page through the site's developer tools. It is not intuitive, and there are no visible fragments of the redirect process embedded within the publishing workflow that would help someone who inherits the work become aware of this step or uncover it through investigating the process.
The alternative method, which is the one I ultimately chose, is to add an excerpt of the external content to the ghost pages along with a button or text link to the original source. That way, if someone lands on the page accidentally, they can still find their way to the content they were expecting.
For the user, this experience may not be ideal because it adds an extra step before they can reach the content they are looking for.
But for the nonprofit communications manager who maintains the site, the second method has important benefits:
It is something they can do intuitively as they add content.
It does not require knowledge of the process to be held outside of the process itself.
When someone new takes on this responsibility, it is easy to learn through discovery. They can simply look at how the preceding posts were set up and do the same thing.
TLDR; processes should be inheritable
The decision meant accepting a small amount of friction for an occasional visitor in exchange for a process that a team could successfully maintain for years.
When we make our decisions based on the assumption that someone new will someday need to operate in the system we have created, we protect the internal staff’s capacity, and protect a communications process over time.
This is what the principle means in practice:
If internal capacity doesn't allow for documentation of the brand and its processes, then those things need to be encoded into the processes themselves.
Systems principles apply to everything.
They apply to templates, brand guidelines, governance, and every other communication system an organization depends on. When knowledge lives inside the process itself, the organization becomes less dependent on institutional memory and better equipped to sustain its work through growth, change, and staff transitions.
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.