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.