What We Do
Nonprofit marketing and communications strategy for organizations ready to scale their impact.
Your organization can’t achieve its full potential without a nonprofit marketing strategy that is aligned with its strategic plan and the priorities of its stakeholders.
We build nonprofit marketing strategies and communications plans focused on driving your organization’s most important strategic objectives forward. Whether you are focused on raising awareness and funds, attracting volunteers, clients and advocates, or fostering stronger relationships with your community, smart marketing is critical.
Our marketing and communications strategy engagements are based on the Nonprofit Strategy SystemTM method and Shared Power StrategyTM philosophy. Through these approaches, we help you center the priorities of your stakeholders and make communications a tool for advancing equity. We also prioritize strength-based communication practices in our marketing and communications strategy work.
Our marketing and communications strategy services
Our marketing and communications strategy engagements typically take one of the following forms:
Organization-Wide Marketing and Communication Strategy
Create a comprehensive plan for your organization’s entire marketing and communications function that includes clear objectives, tactics ranging from paid media to events, a calendar for what must happen when, and accountability for who must do what. Then, make your plan measurable with a marketing objective and key results dashboard.
Campaign-Specific Marketing and Communication Strategy
Create a focused plan for a specific campaign, initiative or communications objective. Examples include things like a program launch campaign, capital campaign or a communications surrounding the announcement of a new CEO. Campaign-specific strategies can also position your organization to take a stand in the face of a crisis or salient current event.
Messaging Strategy
Develop a messaging platform for your nonprofit that communicate the most important things your stakeholders need to know, segment your messaging based on stakeholder needs, and foster adoption across all facets of your organization to ensure messaging consistency. Strength-based communication practices underpin all our messaging work.
In addition to the marketing and communications strategy work detailed above, Prosper Strategies also has extensive experience in nonprofit branding.
Case Study
Find out Comer Education Campus partnered with Prosper Strategies to rebrand and develop the accompanying marketing and communications plan — leading to a 13.8% increase in fundraising from the previous year.
Portfolio Categories
Here’s how our marketing and communications strategy process works, at a high level:
People
We begin every marketing and communications strategy project with a stakeholder assessment to understand how your nonprofit’s stakeholders perceive and are affected by the way your organization communicates. Then, we tap them for input and feedback at key points in the marcomm strategy development process through surveys, interviews, focus groups, listening sessions and/or stakeholder committees.
Involving your stakeholders in this way ensures that your marketing and communications approaches will resonate with them. And when it comes to your constituents, seeking their input is critical to ensure you’re sharing their stories in a way that is aligned with their preferences and true to their lived experience.
Additionally, we conduct an organization assessment where we dive deep into your organization’s current approaches to marketing and communications and associated metrics. We also conduct an ecosystem assessment to help our team and yours better understand how other, similar organizations are approaching marketing and communications. This provides insight into both best practices you can learn from, and areas where you can differentiate.
NEXT: Strategy
Strategy
Next, we facilitate a series of workshops with members of your team to work through developing the key elements of your marketing/communications, campaign or messaging strategy. This typically includes elements like objectives, tactical plans, marcomm calendars, and key messages. Then, we bring those elements together into a written, easy-to-follow strategy document and/or messaging guide. We seek feedback and input from your stakeholders on marketing, communications and messaging strategies as they are developed in order to ensure your organization is communicating in a way that will be both effective and respectful of your constituents’ lived experience.
NEXT: Progress
Progress
The Progress phase is all about ensuring your marketing and communications team has the systems and processes in place to bring your plans to life.
During this phase, we help you develop measurable key results for every objective in your marketing and communications strategy. We also help you determine who is responsible for executing on each tactic, based on a careful evaluation of your team’s skill sets and bandwidth. Finally, we help you put budgets and dashboards in place that make it easy to see how your organization is performing against the marketing and communications objectives you set out to achieve.
In the case of messaging strategy and strength-based communication projects, we also often facilitate team and organization-wide trainings to help everyone at your organization begin to adopt your new approach to messaging. While most of our clients have in-house marketing and communications teams, we can also recommend contract partners who can help you execute your marketing and communications strategy at the conclusion of the planning process.
Case Studies
Success Stories in Nonprofit Marketing and Communications Strategy
![Marketing and Brand Strategy for Human Services Organization: Feeding America]({"default":"https://prosper-strategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/12-img_5761.jpg","2x":"","mobile":"","responsive":"true"} "Marketing and Brand Strategy for Human Services Organization: Feeding America")
Frequently Asked Questions about Our Nonprofit Marketing and Communications Strategy Process:
Q: How long does marketing/communications planning take?
A: It typically takes 3-4 months to develop a comprehensive marketing/communications plan for an entire organization. Department or campaign-specific strategies and messaging platforms can typically be developed in 1-3 months. The variability is due both to the scope of your needs, and the availability of stakeholders to participate in the research that will inform your final plan.
Q: What is the difference between nonprofit marketing and nonprofit communications?
A: We answer this question in detail here.
Q: Do we need to meet in person to develop our nonprofit’s marketing strategy or communications plan?
A: No, marketing and communications planning can often be accomplished remotely. However, in-person retreats and workshops can be valuable for some parts of the planning process, particularly messaging and objective development. We will work with you to determine where in-person sessions should be utilized, if at all.
Q: Who should be involved in marketing or communications planning from my nonprofit?
A: It depends on your team structure. If you have a chief marketing or communications officer or similar role, they should take the lead in the marketing and communications planning process and serve as a key partner for our team at Prosper Strategies. Additionally, we typically recommend creating a staff committee that includes other key members of your marketing/communications team, and often 1-2 representatives who have fundraising-focused responsibilities. In some cases, you may want to involve your CEO, President or other executive-leaders as well. If you do not have a dedicated marketing or communications team, those individuals with the most responsibilities for overseeing and executing a marketing strategy should be involved in the process. Your board can typically be informed, rather than directly involved in the marketing planning process. Finally, we always aim to involve community members, supporters, and program and service participants in the marketing planning process via surveys, interviews, listening sessions and plan draft review. This allows us to build plans that are truly responsive to stakeholder needs and preferences.
Q: What differentiates Prosper Strategies from other marketing strategy consultants?
A: Our most important differentiator is our Shared Power™ Philosophy, which guides our expertise in building marketing and communications planning processes that deeply engage a nonprofit’s many diverse stakeholders. This approach produces plans that truly move the needle. Additionally, we only work with nonprofits, and have 12+ years of experience leading marketing and communications strategy engagements for nonprofits of all shapes and sizes. Many of our clients are large, federated or umbrella-structure organizations like Feeding America, Horizons National and Boys & Girls Clubs of America. We also have extensive experience with mid-size and large organizations in mission areas ranging from health and the environment to education and human services.
We got our start as a marketing agency, and those roots still impact our work deeply today. However, today, a large portion of our work is focused on strategic planning. This gives us a unique perspective on how marketing should relate to and advance a nonprofit’s strategic plan, and allows us to build plans that actually move the needle.
Finally, our unique team structure sets Prosper Strategies apart. We are a small team by design, meaning you’ll always work directly with one or both of our firm’s principals, Lindsay Mullen and Alyssa Conrardy. But we also have a deep bench of specialized and diverse consultants in everything from design to digital marketing who partner with our principals, and we build teams for each marketing and communications planning engagement based on your specific needs.
Q: What does nonprofit marketing and communications planning cost?
A: Each engagement is custom designed based on a wide variety of factors. Please contact us to discuss your needs, and we’ll happily share more about pricing.
Q: Who are the best marketing strategy consultants for nonprofits?
A: Prosper Strategies is a leading marketing and communications strategy firm that works with some of the world’s most impactful nonprofits, from Feeding America to The United Mitochondrial Disease foundation. If we’re not the right fit for you, please contact us and we’d be happy to recommend another firm.
Q: Will you respond to our RFP?
A: We do not typically respond to RFPs. Here’s why. That said, we’d be happy to take a look at the requirements you’ve put together and discuss the best way to move forward. Please email your RFP to hello@prosper-strategies.com.
Q: What kind of results can we expect?
A: At the conclusion of a successful comprehensive marketing planning engagement, you’ll have a clear, actionable, stakeholder-informed plan for your organization’s marketing/communications function. This will include marketing/communications pillars, objectives, key results, tactical plans, a marketing calendar and budget, and a messaging platform. Your stakeholders will be aligned around the plan (because they helped develop it!) and excited to move it forward. You’ll also have the actionable systems you need to bring your marketing plan to life, including a marketing OKR dashboard, activity plans for everyone on your team, and a meeting cadence to keep you all aligned about how implementation is going and what may need to shift. For campaign planning, you’ll receive similar deliverables, but focused on a specific campaign rather than your entire marcomm function. For messaging projects, you’ll walk away with a messaging platform that includes overarching messaging, messaging by stakeholder, messaging use guidelines, and in some cases training assets to help your team adopt the messaging platform.
The results you can expect from implementing your plan will vary based on the pillars and OKRs your team selects in the planning process. Our clients have realized results such as a 45% lift in brand clarity and likelihood to donate as a result of our marketing strategy work. Marketing strategy work also often has a tangible impact on fundraising results, with many clients reporting 2-3x growth in fundraising revenue over a several year period of implementation following our marketing planning process.
Q: How can I learn more or get started?
A: If you’re simply looking to learn more about marketing and communications strategy but don’t have a specific need at this time, browse our resources here. If you are planning to embark on a marketing or communications planning process soon and want to discuss partnering with Prosper Strategies, we’d be delighted to set up a time to talk. Please contact us here.
Contact Us | Start Your Nonprofit Marketing or Brand Project
Ready to learn more about partnering with Prosper Strategies for your nonprofit's marketing, branding, communications or messaging strategy needs? Get in touch by filling out the form below.
"*" indicates required fields