Deliver Your Donor Communications as a Beautifully Wrapped Gift

Quiz time for NP CEOs and directors!

What’s your take on investing in professional graphic design? Is it…

A) essential

B) optional

C) wasteful

You don’t have to share your response, but I bet it’s obvious which you would pick with just one look at your org’s materials.

What I hear most often from nonprofit teams are bottom-line woes:

There’s never enough money to invest in professional graphic designers, so an admin or volunteer tosses it together using template-based or AI platforms.

Those tools have a place, for sure. (I use Canva on the regular for quick, fun graphics.) But for branded design elements that will be front-and-center for more than a single social media post? For those, I turn to the professionals.

Shout out to Micah Vetter for developing my branding last year. Still makes my heart swoon.

Effective communication includes HOW that message is designed for delivery. Because HOW you present your message matters. It’s the combination and placement of words, images, graphics, colors, fonts—the whole look for how you present what you want to say.

There’s a world of difference between a professional graphic designer’s work and something that’s pulled together with a template. Graphic designers are not just people who know how to use certain software. They have a distinctive eye for elevating the message from flat words on a page, screen, or presentation to full-blown conceptual art that deeply connects with the audience.

Graphic designers are true artists—they have developed a sense of proportion, color combinations, imagery selection and placement, design balance and alignment. When you see their work, it moves you. Which is exactly what you want when communicating your org’s cause! If you want your donors to be effectively engaged with your missional message, don’t cut corners on HOW you package it.

So start where you are and commit to investing in the creative budget a bit more each year. Dedicate those dollars to designing key, signature pieces first. Those elements tend to be more evergreen and worth investing in since they will be used regularly—like your annual report, top investor booklets, website, and so on. As your library of professionally designed pieces grows, you can then apply those design concepts to the one-off graphics.

Do you invest in the HOW of message delivery? What challenges do you face?

Ready for more?

Here are two ways I can help you make your mission irresistible to donors:
 
1. Connect with me or follow me on LinkedIn.
That’s the first place I explore donor strategy ideas like these. Be sure to join the convo!
 
2. Work with me.
I help nonprofits already raising $1M+ annually to remove the mission-critical blind spots that keep their donors from giving and keep their teams running ragged. Should we work together? Let’s see!

Schedule your 15-minute Change Chat here and share about your nonprofit and how you’d like to improve your donor strategy.