Caldwell Communications helps nonprofits communicate the substance and value of their work, build dependable sources of support, and strengthen the systems staff rely on every day.
We shape each engagement around the particularities of each organization—its mission, its people, its pressures, and the areas where focused effort can make the greatest difference.
Strategic Messaging Across Audiences and Channels
Much of my work begins by establishing a shared language for the organization. Good messaging does more than explain programs to the public. It helps donors, volunteers, partners, staff, and board members understand the same essential things about the work: what the organization does, what distinguishes its approach, why the work matters, and what their support makes possible. It also gives funders a clear account of the organization’s character, value, and capacity.
Once this language is in place, it can be adapted across annual reports, websites, newsletters, social media, letters of inquiry, grant applications, and grant reports. Each medium calls for a different form and emphasis, but the underlying messages remain related and mutually reinforcing. My role is to identify and refine these messages so that the organization does not have to begin from scratch each time it communicates.
How I Work
The way a nonprofit communicates, raises support, and organizes its work shapes what it is able to do
Communications, fundraising, and internal systems establish the conditions in which an organization acts. Its language influences who understands and supports the work; its development practices affect what it can pursue and sustain; and its systems determine whether staff can carry plans into practice. I work within each area while attending to how decisions in one can expand—or constrain—the possibilities in the others.
Inspired by Design thinking
Design thinking
is a people-centered approach to creative action. It prioritizes empathy over rigidity, elegance over needless complexity, action over open-ended discussion.
is founded upon the idea that one-size-fits-all approaches can produce inefficiencies and needless friction, and teaches that care must be taken to understand the unique geometries of every challenge.
often involves “stepping back from the immediate issue and taking a broader look. It requires systems thinking: realizing that any problem is part of a larger whole, and that the solution is likely to require understanding the entire system.” Don Norman
More on Design Thinking at Stanford’s D-school and the Harvard Business Review.
Creating elegant efficiencies
through acute observation, empathetic conversation, open-minded problem solving, and (whenever possible) rich and memorable prose.
Short bio here.
Services
