In anticipation of each new fiscal year, organizations are faced with the logistical questions around budgets, campaign goals, and membership engagement.
Graphic design, web development, social media strategy, and various other communications pieces are important parts of moving your organizational priorities forward. Design Action Collective has been working with non profit organizations and grassroots campaigns for over 20 years and understands that we are often faced with tight timelines and scarce resources in movements for social change. We can find creative ways to meet those urgent needs as we are faced with moments of political crisis. However, we can also plan ahead for the projects that organizations can anticipate as they confirm budgets and quarterly plans.
Here are a few best practices and considerations we’d like to share with you.
Start the conversation with your design team before you finalize your content.
Talk to your designer about the story you want to tell and who you are hoping to reach. Your design team can strategize with you around the format of your media piece (is it a printed report, a mini website, a postcard mailer, an instagram video or some combination of pieces?). This can inform the images to create or procure, word counts to guide your writing and editing process, and plans for printing or digital production. This will also be an opportunity to discuss language access needs and accessibility standards.
Review your analytics
When starting a website redesign, knowing which pieces of content on your current website are most used and by whom can inform how content is organized on a new site. Plan ahead to have analytics tools capturing data on your site’s usage well in advance. Having information about your audience’s online behavior can help your design team structure a site that speaks clearly to your current audience and grow to welcome in new donors, members and other advocates for your work.
Budget in advance.
Decide what priorities you have for communications this year and build it into your budget for the fiscal year. Of course, the larger your budget, the more options you’ll have for creative projects. But with good planning, there is a lot that can be accomplished within a range of budgets. At Design Action, when we understand the priorities and the budget cap, we can cater a process to fit your needs best.
Create realistic timelines that involve your stakeholders.
The longer the timeline, the more space you have for review and revisions. Consider when this piece or series of communication pieces needs to launch and work backwards from there. Your design team can help you create bench marks for finalizing content, reviewing drafts, and approving final designs so that files can be prepped for print or digital distribution. Think about which members of your staff need to be involved in decision making and ensure you are all on the same page about those plans.
Consider templatizing your annual needs.
Many organizations have a set of projects they know they need every year. Maybe it is an annual report or a quarterly newsletter or an awards gala event. And in an election year, perhaps it is a voter guide or a series of candidate endorsements. Consider investing in a style guide and suite of templates that you can use year after year which you can customize without starting from scratch each time. This will reduce staff time at your end, build in efficiencies with your design team which reduces budgets, and makes timelines more manageable.
At Design Action Collective, we know that the political terrain is constantly moving under our feet and we are all doing our best to react and respond. But the more we can plan in advance, the more strategic our movement’s communications tools can be.
For information on how to work with Design Action Collective on logo/branding projects, websites, reports, social media content development, or video production, visit our website.