Build a Successful Social Impact Marketing Team

This article is drawn from our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 04. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. The conversation has been edited for brevity and readability.

This is Part 1 of a 2-part series on Building Your Social Impact Marketing Team. They can be read in any order.

After working with us and doing a big rebrand, website overhaul, and rethinking of their communications and digital engagement strategy, our clients often ask similar questions:

How can we make the best possible marketing team for our social impact organization?
How can we actually sustain it and do we need to add people to do so?
Should we be asking people in our organization to take on some of this work as part of their program or project work?

The answers to these questions lies partly in understanding several aspects of building a social impact marketing team.

Key Pillars to Building a Successful Social Impact Marketing Team

Pillar 1: Build Your Marketing on Top of a Solid Brand Strategy

If you don't have a solid brand strategy, you could be doing the best marketing work in the world, but it's not actually going to make a huge impact.

You’ve got to understand who you're talking to — who is the person that's going to be reading or listening to your communications.

But if you start to do marketing all willy-nilly like — just putting content out there for the sake of putting content out there without a solid brand strategy — then you're setting yourself up for failure. We see this happen sometimes with marketing teams where they don't have leadership guiding them around their brand strategy. The marketing/communications team needs the answers to some important questions:

What's the strategic plan for the organization?
Where are we going?
What's the vision?

If those things aren’t clear, then you can't do marketing effectively. Having those answers is a prerequisite to doing marketing well.

Pillar 2: Think of Marketing and Brand Building as Core Business Functions

Think about marketing and brand building the same way that you think about development, fundraising, and impact evaluation reporting. If you think about marketing as a thing you do after the “real work” is done, you're always going to struggle with marketing. It's a trap that leaders can fall into in the social impact space where they think of marketing as secondary. They can have an if we build it, they shall come mentality. But as many leaders have learned the hard way — this doesn't work.

We recognize that there's always been a stigma around marketing in the social impact space. Sometimes it gets tied into the broader discussion around overhead and how much of your work is going directly to program work and helping people that you're trying to serve. We’ve seen enough evidence at this point — and maybe we’re a little biased here because this is the work that we do day-in and day-out — to see that when done effectively, investing in marketing is an impact multiplier for your work.

Thinking about marketing as an investment in the future of your organization has the potential to elevate all of the rest of the work that you're doing. Because so much of success today is around earning attention and turning attention into action. If you do marketing and brand building effectively, it can really supercharge all of those efforts.

So what does marketing and brand building as a core business function look like? It means talking about it with your board, talking about it with your team, having a budget for it so that it’s part of your annual budget or per program budget.

However you want to do it, it can’t be this thing that you get to if there's extra time or money — because you know that there's never extra time or money when you're doing social impact work.

Pillar 3: Know Your Audience

When we say, “Know your audience.”, we mean that you need to really deeply understand your audience. Spend time with them. Talk to them. Have discussions with them. Interacting with them online, in person, and in any channel that they are in. And instead of thinking about your marketing as a megaphone, think about it more as a conversation and an opportunity to engage and share ideas with your community.

It's best if someone on your marketing team understands or has experienced the impact that your organization is trying to deliver. Not just executive leadership. Not just your board. But someone on your marketing team needs to deeply understand the meaning behind the impact that your organization delivers. It’s a critical component to building a great team.

Other Ways to Understand Your Audiences

If you're a marketer in a social impact organization and you don't have that lived experience, there is a way to learn through your community.

The easiest thing to say and the most difficult thing to do, is to spend time with the people who you're serving or in the space that you're serving. There is no other way to do it. You can put together the fanciest research plans and you can have the fanciest consultants from the fanciest firms, but at the end of the day, if you or your marketing team are not spending time with the people that you're serving or in the environment that you're trying to work in, you're never going to get it.

When our clients do this work day-in and day-out and they spend the time and the effort to truly, deeply know their audience that they're serving and their audience of supporters, it makes our jobs so much easier. They can bring those insights to us and we can use those insights to inform our creative and strategic approach. We see how everything clicks so much more when there is that understanding and alignment. It's easy to skip over.

You think you know your audience. But do you really deeply know them? Do you understand them? And are you keeping a pulse on how their behaviors and their motivations are changing?

Pillar 4: Create Scroll-stopping Content

What we mean by scroll-stopping is content that is not just boilerplate expected information-centered content, but content that is actually engaging, emotional, and interesting — content that literally stops people in their scroll.

We admit, it’s really, really, really hard to do this well. And in our experience, this is one of the things that social impact organizations are the worst at. And again, it's hard. So we’re not blaming people for this, but it’s frustrating because social impact organizations have literally the best raw ingredients for storytelling of any type of organization in the world. But if the execution of that storytelling and that content is not approached effectively, then they're not getting the most juice out of the raw content that they have.

At a high level, we want to understand the culture of whatever distribution platform or channel that we are creating content for. We want to select a couple of platforms that our clients get really good at instead of just blasting content all over the place without personalizing it for the culture of each channel or platform.

Social impact organizations need to tell three key stories in their content:

A Case for Support - Why does your mission or your issue matter?
Stories of Impact - Proof that your organization is making a meaningful, effective difference
Calls to Action - Inviting your community to participate, to show up, to take action

You have to strike a balance between those three. Often we see people maybe do really well at one of those three types of core content, but not so well on the other two. Getting all three humming is really important.

Walking a Line

We've seen in the social impact space that organizations sometimes tend to take their cause so seriously and care so deeply about it that sometimes it gets into their heads that creating scroll-stopping content is exploitative in some way. There’s an idea that they're exploiting the people they serve or in some cases and causing pain for people. They’re dealing with real human suffering — and maybe featuring them in an impact story is actually exploiting the people they're serving. And that can be a barrier, whether it's a high stakes social impact organization or a relatively low stakes one.

Social impact leaders sometimes get caught in this trap where they feel a little bad or a little dirty sharing these stories. But they have to overcome that fear and realize that sharing those stories is an impact accelerator.

But you have to do storytelling ethically. If you are approaching storytelling in an extractive way — where you're essentially just using people's pain and suffering to gather attention in a way that's not sensitive to that pain and suffering, or you don't have the right amount of buy-in from people's individual stories — there are scenarios where that's taken too far and it is extractive. There's a balance to strike there.

There's a ton of information out there about how to do ethical storytelling these days. For example, Maria Bryan trains storytellers to gather and tell powerful, impactful, and trauma-informed stories in a way that promotes safety and wellness, resists harm, and has a huge impact. Telling these stories is one of the superpowers that social impact organizations have to reach people and to get attention.

Content Creation is a Long Game

Producing creative, scroll-stopping content is a lifelong pursuit. You’re never done with this. No matter how much experience you have with marketing and brand building, this is something you’re always learning. This is something we’re learning every single day, and we’ve been doing this for a very long time.

And the culture of these platforms and what's actually breaking through is always changing. So you should be spending just as much time determining how you’re packaging your content.

What's the hook for your content?
How are you framing your stories?
Is a story likely to break through and capture attention?

Because if it's not breaking through, then it doesn't matter how important the story is. If no one's seeing it or reading it or engaging with it, then you're not doing service to the story itself. So spending way more time on this than you think you need to is critical.

Today is a great time to experiment, try new things, and get creative. There's generally a patience for experimentation and an interest in seeing some wacky ideas. A lot of social impact content is very serious. These are serious issues. They have real stakes. People's lives and livelihoods are at stake sometimes. So we get why it's serious.

But you can't throw a white paper up on X (fmr Twitter) and expect people to read it. You can't do long form audio on TikTok and expect people to interact with it. You need to find ways to get more creative, more emotional, and sometimes more fun with our content — even if that feels intuitively wrong. Because at the end of the day, you need to find out how to get these ideas out into the world in a way that works for how people engage with content today.

Consistency is Crucial

Consistency is a word that a lot of times immediately pushes people to go into a publishing cadence mode. And cadence is a big part of creating a story for your subscribers, customers, followers, or community. You always have to train your audience what to expect. Can they expect a new episode every week? Can they expect a new email once a month? But you have to realize that people aren't always going to see your content when it drops. No one is reading every single one of your emails. Because of how algorithms work, no one has seen every single one of your social posts.

So when it comes to consistency, start by thinking a little bit about cadence. What we usually advise is to set a cadence that you can realistically commit to — one that's going to break through the threshold of whatever particular channel or platform(s) that you and your supporters are on, knowing that each channel or platform has some kind of rough threshold.

It's not a perfect equation, but social impact leaders usually have a sense of what's reasonable and what’s possible before you start to lose quality. If you commit to a cadence that you're a slave to, and you just keep putting content out at a certain clip — but it's not sustainable for you and your capacity — inevitably quality is going to suffer. Engagement's going to go down.

On the flip side, if you're completely sporadic and there's no cadence to what you're doing, or there's no consistency to what you're doing, then that can be an issue as well. People don't know what to expect. So you're not breaking through and capturing attention. So consistency, in the broader sense of the word, is important.

An Approach to Determining Your Cadence

Think about how often your audience and constituent base needs value from you or from your organization. Consider mapping your content cadence to your customer's needs more than your own.

Let’s use a simplified version of animal shelters as an example. Imagine we're working at an animal shelter and part of our marketing is telling sweet, cute stories of the animals that are up for adoption. If I'm marketing the outcome, I care about adoption rates. I want more animals adopted more quickly, and I'm talking to an audience of people that will adopt once every 10 years. Do I need to remind that same group of people who have adopted, about the new animals that are up for adoption every week?

Now, you could argue that actually that helps to reinforce the impact we're having and maybe we'll bring in donations. But the point here is determining if I need to get one family to adopt another animal. The answer is ‘No’. They already got that value from me. Maybe I should market to that group a little bit differently than to people who are looking to adopt — develop a cadence that better suits this audience segment. Having personalization and being aware of the context of your marketing is important when it comes to determining your content cadence.

Pillar 5: Evaluate, Experiment, and be Curious

These are qualities of an effective marketing team. Whether that's the team itself or individuals within the team, these are the qualities that you need to nurture and build over time.

To be effective marketers, you have to be willing to play the long game. But more than that, you need to stay curious — curious about why a thing that you thought was going to be so successful turned out to be an engagement flop. Wondering why the thing we thought might flop got so much engagement. So having a mindset of curiosity is important because it can be really easy to get discouraged as a marketer if you've put a lot of time and energy into something — into a campaign or a piece of content — and it doesn't get the reception that you're hoping for.

You want to know why. What went wrong? Where did I go wrong? You even start to get introspective about this. We’ve done a lot of this work for Cosmic and with clients, and most successful marketers that we've seen do the reps. They're consistent, and through that consistency, they build skill.

Two Repetition Frameworks

There's a story (don’t know if it’s true) of a science experiment where a pottery class was broken into two cohorts. Cohort one was assigned to build the most beautiful vase they possibly could in a certain amount of time. Let's say it was a month. Cohort two was asked to build as many vases as they possibly could within that same amount of time. The outcomes were that the vases in cohort two ended up being significantly better, more skillfully created vases than cohort one because they did the reps. They weren't setting out for excellence. Excellence was achieved through repetition and learning.

Another theory on this is Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000- Hour Rule” from his book Outliers where he proposes that achieving world-class expertise in a skill takes about 10,000 hours of practice.

Doing the reps is much of this, but that’s only helpful if you are curious about the outcomes, you're evaluating the outcomes, and you're evolving based on those experiments. These are some of the qualities that drive effective marketing teams.

Pillar 6: Understand the Marketing, Fundraising, and Sales Connection

There's a strong connection between marketing and fundraising or sales. If you're a social enterprise, this is something that seems very obvious. You want marketing to drive sales, donations, support, or action if you're an advocacy brand. But oftentimes these roles or efforts get siloed. So there are fundraisers and salespeople out there working deals, and then there's marketing people out there putting out messages, but the left hand and the right hand aren’t talking to each other.

We've experienced this in our early days working in the for-profit tech sector and in the social impact sector. As long as there's marketing with any sort of financial transaction involved, this problem's going to exist. So don't feel bad if this exists in your organization.

And the good news is it’s solvable. A lot of it comes down to having your niche, brand, messaging, and audiences all really, really well-defined. Make sure that the leaders from both the sales or fundraising and marketing teams are forced to work together and coordinate.

This is an Executive Director or CEO problem. If your teams aren’t communicating well, that means you're not doing a good enough job of creating an environment in which their goals are mutually reinforcing. You want your marketing leader to be successful when sales is successful and vice versa. And that’s an executive leadership responsibility. You need to get the right levers in place for that motivation to emerge.

The real tragedy here is that they have so much potential to work synergistically. If we talk about fundraising and marketing, what do fundraisers and salespeople need? They need stories of impact. They need content to incentivise current and potential donors and to reinforce their impact stories. That's not all they need, but for fundraisers, that’s gold.

Keep in mind that you need the stories and the names of people too. And this applies to for-profit sales organizations too. Sales and marketing teams need to understand how the product works, what the value of the product is, and to understand who the right people are to put the story in front of in order to make the sale.

And the same thing exists in social impact fundraising too. Ask your team to qualify potential donors and present them to you at the right time. Make sure you’re getting in front of the right people, and then when you’re in front of them, that you have the stories that absolutely slap.

These systems can be built. We’ve seen this play between marketing and fundraising work before and it can work again. Going back to an earlier point, you want to deeply understand your audience. And if you can get information from your fundraising or sales team around what things are lighting people up, that gives you content ideas for future content production. So you could see how these two systems — fundraising/sales and marketing — should be working together synergistically, and when they don't, it really holds everything back.

Pillar 7: Build Your Team to be Nimble and Empower Them to be Creative

Even if you could afford to build a very large marketing team, the most successful marketing teams that we've seen stay small and nimble. They are given agency to do the work. They don't have tons of levels of hierarchy to navigate to get any one social post put out or campaign launched. They're hired for their skills, expertise, value, and cultural alignment. And then they're left to do their thing. They get to do marketing and they get to own it.

There might be some oversight and some strategic input from the ED/CEO and other stakeholders, but the marketing team feels like they have the freedom to just be creative. And small teams can make huge impacts when that's true. So even if you are a bigger organization and you’re building out an in-house marketing team, don't feel like you need to make it huge for it to be successful, sometimes the smallest teams are the most successful.

Success is a Team Effort

Building an effective social impact marketing team should begin with a solid brand-building strategy, an organization-wide understanding that marketing is a core business function that requires significant investment, and a philosophy that your team needs to be nimble and creative if you are to succeed in the attention economy.

While we’ve mostly focused on the marketing team, everyone in your organization has to understand that marketing is baked into everything you do. Marketing is part of brand-building and when everyone is working to elevate your brand, your organization has a better chance of getting noticed by funders, volunteers, top-tier talent, and members of the public who can become advocates that help you accomplish your goals faster.

Learn More About Building Your Social Impact Marketing Team

This is Part 1 of a 2-part series on Building Your Social Impact Marketing Team. Part 2 coming soon.

Seven Key Pillars to Building a Successful Social Impact Marketing Team