Nonprofits don’t have a communications & fundraising problem. They have a marketing problem.

Let’s start with the word nobody in the nonprofit sector wants to say out loud:

Marketing.

I know. It feels wrong. Marketing is what corporations do to sell you things you don’t need and can’t afford. Marketing is manipulation, it’s spin, it’s the dark arts of capitalism dressed up in brand guidelines. Nonprofits are mission-driven, so they’re above all that, right?

The collapse of nonprofit funding that accelerated—from slow-roll in late 2024 into free-fall as of early 2026—would beg to differ. Nonprofits are struggling to reach donors—even as the logic and need for their continued mission becomes more obvious.  Campaigns are falling flat, monthly newsletters go unread, and development staff are burning out trying to carry the weight of external communications on top of their actual jobs. Most nonprofit websites are so dense with policy-speak that a first-time visitor can’t figure out what the organization actually does or why they should care.

That’s not a communications problem. That’s what happens when an entire sector decides it doesn’t do marketing—and then wonders why nobody’s listening.

Marketing, stripped of its corporate baggage, is actually a simple idea: you figure out who you’re talking to, what they care about, and how to tell them why your work matters in language that reaches them where they are. A major donor and a first-time volunteer and a community member directly affected by your work all need to hear a different version of your story. Not because you’re being manipulative — because that’s how human communication works. Different people, different entry points, different reasons to give a damn.

Nonprofits are in the business of changing things—changing policy, changing behavior, changing material conditions for real people. And yet the sector has largely decided that the tools most useful for changing minds—marketing, brand strategy, audience segmentation, message development — are somehow beneath the mission. The result is communications that functions primarily as reporting: to funders, to boards, to policy audiences already inside the tent. Useful, sure. But not designed to move anyone who isn’t already moved.

This shows up in three specific, interconnected ways.

The language problem

There is a particular kind of nonprofit website that makes you yawn before you finish the first sentence. Dense paragraphs full of “leveraging synergistic partnerships to advance equitable outcomes for underserved communities.” Language so marinated in policy-speak it has forgotten that human beings will need to read it—human beings who did not go to graduate school for public policy and are not being paid to care.

Somewhere along the way, sounding serious became conflated with sounding like a grant application. It doesn’t work like that. Facts can be presented with warmth. Data can tell a story. Urgency can feel like urgency instead of a quarterly report. This is not a mystery or a compromise of rigor—it’s just writing, done by someone who understands that the reader’s attention is not guaranteed and must be earned.

Unless your only audience is policy wonks and program officers—in which case, fine, be boring. But if you are trying to reach individual donors, community members, volunteers, or anyone who doesn’t already speak your dialect, you need a writer. One who understands how to craft stories that get read. And then you need to let them write, actually without the boilerplate criticism that “we’ve never done it that way before so we can’t do it that way now without a year-long feasibility study by senior management.”

Nonprofits aren’t bad at communications. They’ve just categorically rejected the discipline most likely to help them and then dressed that rejection up as a values statement. Marketing isn’t the enemy of mission. Done well, it’s how mission travels.

The org chart problem

In a stunning number of nonprofits, communications work gets quietly absorbed by the development and fundraising staff—people who are already doing one of the hardest, most relationship-dependent jobs in the organization. They’re managing donor relationships, writing grants, running campaigns, stewarding major gifts. And somewhere in the margins of all that, they’re also supposed to be writing the newsletter, managing social media, updating the website, and developing messaging for three different audience segments.

This is not a resource problem. It’s a values problem. It reveals, clearly and without ambiguity, that communications isn’’ considered real work requiring real expertise. It’s considered something anyone can do in their remaining eleven minutes on a Tuesday.

That assumption is expensive—in staff burnout, in inconsistent or confusing messaging, in the slow erosion of an organization’s ability to tell its own story with any coherence or power. It’s also worth pointing out that when comms work is produced as an add-on, it is often reduced to dissemination of facts. Without story to carry the information in a compelling and artful way, readership and engagement declines, along with donations and volunteer signups.

The fundraising problem

Here is the thing nobody seems to want to say out loud: fundraising depends on communications. Not the other way around.

Your development staff cannot build the donor relationships, steward the major gifts, or run the successful campaigns that keep your organization alive if the communications infrastructure underneath them is an afterthought. The story has to already exist—clearly articulated, consistently told, differentiated for different audiences—before you can ask it to carry the weight of your fundraising goals.

When communications is buried in the development function, you get the worst of both worlds: fundraising staff who are stretched to breaking, and communications that exists only in service of the next ask. There’s no room to build brand, deepen community relationships, or do the slower work of making people feel genuinely connected to your mission before you need something from them.

That slower work is marketing. And it’s exactly what most nonprofits aren’t doing.

If any of this landed — if you’re a nonprofit leader who’s been aware that something isn’t working but couldn’t name it — I’d love to talk. If you’re comfortable with the status quo, I’m probably not your person. But if you’re ready to go from over-reporting to connecting, I’ve got decades of marketing and communications expertise to help you get there.

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Think I’m being hyperbolic? Here’s what recent reports indicate: