We will stop making our nonprofit status an excuse for our weak, unrecognizable and unremarkable brands. In fact, we’ll start believing, and acting on the belief, that our brands should be among the most revered brands in the world, mentioned in the same breath as Amazon, Tesla, Google and Apple. Their budgets may be greater than ours, but our aims are far higher, and our value to society is far greater.

We will start from within. We will develop an internal sense of brand identity rooted in our mission and values.

We recognize that our organizations cannot achieve their full potential for mission impact if our internal stakeholders present an inconsistent image of who we are and what we stand for. But this does not mean we will force our brand identity and image on our staff or other stakeholders. We will not turn them into robots, parroting the same key messages in the same way over and over again. Instead, we will make the development of our brands a participatory process, giving our internal stakeholders a role in shaping our brands and the license to personalize the way they represent our organizations within a set of guideposts that ensure consistency and cohesion.

We will squash the limiting belief that our organizations should have only one spokesperson. We will empower each of our team members to represent our organizations in a way that is both consistent with our brands and personal to them.

But we will not stop there. We will recognize that every stakeholder our organizations come in contact with, from a first-time donor, to a beneficiary of our services, to a long-standing board member, has the potential to be an ambassador for our brands and our missions. We will recognize that especially in today’s 24/7 social media world, people will talk about, and on behalf of, our organizations whether we give them the permission to do so or not. We will provide our diverse range of stakeholders with the tools, training, support and encouragement to become our most powerful brand ambassadors.

Every time our organizations develop a strategic plan, we will evaluate each goal within the plan to understand how marketing and communications can be used to advance it. We will denounce the idea that marketing can serve only one or two of our nonprofits’ strategic goals, and instead, explore innovative ways to integrate the power of marketing into everything we do.

Our marketing plans will be inextricably connected to our strategic plans, with each organization-wide goal and objective linked to a marketing and communications goal and objective. In fact, there will be nothing in our marketing plan that does not address a specific need or aim identified in our strategic plan.

After all, we now recognize that marketing is nothing less than an essential tool for driving the social change our organizations seek. To underinvest in marketing is to underinvest in the missions we wake up every day motivated to go to work for. We will therefore invest in developing well-resourced marketing teams, including experienced leadership, effective support staff, and innovative agency and consultant partners capable of realizing the full potential of marketing at our organizations.

Marketing and communications will be overseen by an experienced leader who reports to our CEO, if not by our CEO herself. We will recognize that marketing is not more or less important than the other executive functions of our organizations, but rather a critical part of every effective leadership team.

But this does not mean that marketing will be siloed into the realm of the executive team or into the marketing and communications department. We will recognize that every single person on our staff contributes to the success or failure of our marketing efforts, and we will give our staff at every level the tools and support they need to make a positive contribution.

We know that our own organizations, as innovative as they might be, exist among many others focused on similar goals. We will aim to differentiate ourselves for the purpose of advancing our own objectives, but we will never aim to be “the best” or “the only” organizations in our focus areas. Instead, we will build partnerships with other organizations, acknowledging that we’re stronger together than we are alone.

We will recognize that our brands and marketing communications are key assets that make our organizations appealing to potential partners, and we’ll aim to strengthen them accordingly. We’ll also aim to develop brands that work in concert with our partners, neither overshadowing them nor getting lost beneath them.

We will say no to poverty porn, famine porn, stereotype porn and all of their close cousins, which exploit the conditions of the people we serve in order to generate sympathy and increase support for our causes. We will recognize that this type of marketing does more harm than good, from causing compassion fatigue to perpetuating a sense that the people our organizations serve are helpless and somehow lesser.

Instead, we will say yes to marketing that tells a more complete story about the  people and communities we work with, or better yet, allows them to tell their stories themselves. We are smart and strategic enough to develop marketing campaigns that both inspire support and preserve the dignity of those we aim to help.

We will do everything we can to develop approaches and tools that help us understand how our marketing efforts are impacting our missions today, and how that impact shifts in the future as our marketing evolves.

We will measure continuously, to the very best of our ability, and make real-time adjustments to our marketing based on what we observe as having the greatest impact on our missions.