What Makes a Great Social Impact Marketing Team

This article is drawn from our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 04. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. The conversation has been edited for brevity and readability.

This is Part 2 of a 2-part series on Building Your Social Impact Marketing Team. You can start with Part 1, but they can be read in any order.
 

After working with us — doing a big rebrand, website overhaul, and rethinking their branding, communications, development, marketing, and digital engagement strategies — our clients often as similar questions:

• Should people in our organization be involved in marketing as part of their program or project work? 
• How can we build the best possible social impact marketing team? 
• How do we sustain our marketing efforts and build capacity to market consistently?

Let’s dive into some answers.

What Makes a Great Social Impact Marketing Team

There's not one silver bullet playbook for how you should build a marketing team. 

But over the years of working with social impact organizations large and small, local and global, we’ve put together some benchmarks based on different sized organizations. 

Modest-sized Organizations

In our opinion, if you are less than $1M in revenue a year, Executive Director -or CEO-led marketing is the way to go. This approach could be supported by individual consultants or freelancers to help with some of the more executional and tactical parts of it. In terms of coming up with the ideas for the stories that you're telling your audience are best coming from the CEO or Executive Director. As the leader of a social impact organization of that size, you need to be deeply engaged in marketing content production.

Some people think that this is a dangerous approach. Instead they believe that the ED or CEO needs to be making sure that they’re spending their time on the highest leverage activities — that their time is best used raising money directly from donors, foundations, or investors, and improving the product or service.

The trend we’re seeing a lot more of — especially in smaller organizations — is that marketing is seen as a core important function that it isn't thought of as “lesser than fundraising” or “lesser than” any of the other important things in their work. 

Are we suggesting that a CEO or ED should spend 75% of their day on marketing? Definitely not. 25% of their day? We think that's reasonable. And spending that much time on marketing will actually make you a better leader. Because to do marketing well, you have to be able to connect it to fundraising. You have to be able to connect it to knowing your audience. The act of publishing and producing content forces you to sharpen and crystallize your ideas. What a social impact organization’s ED or CEO should be prioritizing is a healthy debate to have, but we’re seeing a lot more of this happen — in the B2B world especially.

Know Your Limits

We talk about content being king. Marketing is a way that you can produce content and live it authentically. But if it's starting to get in the way — if it's taken to the point where you're getting caught up in the intoxication of storytelling and it's fun and you enjoy it — but you're not doing some of your other core responsibilities, then it's gone too far. As you get larger and some of those other responsibilities become more necessary, and as your team grows and you have more responsibilities, then you're inevitably going to have to give some of that up.

Mid-sized Organizations

If you're between $1M - $5M in revenue, you should have at least one agency partner for bigger lifts — website overhauls, rebrands, etc. — some of the bigger plays that you're going to do.

Now, we’re biased because we’re a creative agency. But we work with organizations of this size a lot and they’re not yet big enough for it to make sense to build their own in-house agency. Yet there does come a point where that is a good idea, and we've seen this happen successfully. But at this size, you can really benefit from having an agency partner for bigger lifts as you start to build out more in-house capacity. 

What would that look like? 

Maybe a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) type role, who’s a marketing manager overseeing all of the marketing responsibilities and coordinating with contractors or individuals on the team. Someone who’s talking to the fundraising staff, that's talking to the executive director that owns this as their only job or their main job. Toward the higher end of this scale, you also start to bring on either full-time, part-time, or contract content producers like writers, photographers, and designers — people who can actually help with the nuts and bolts of day-to-day content production.

Even at this size, the ED or CEO should still be pretty closely involved in marketing. Now, are they doing as much of the content production? Maybe not, but does your small team set up a corner of the office to easily create short form video, and does the ED or CEO come in for an hour session once or twice a week to help create some of that content? Yes. That would be a really good strategy. 

Does that CEO or ED sometimes pen an op-ed, write an article, or help oversee the production of a bigger piece of hero content? Again, yes. That’s still a good strategy.

When To Bring In An Agency

We mentioned bringing in an agency to help with a big swing rebrand or a big strategic pivot, but when is it appropriate to bring in an outside agency or vendor for the day-to-day stuff, the cadence related work?

This might be slightly controversial, but we don't think it makes sense to bring an agency on to help with that stuff. We've seen the most success happen from teams where they build that day-to-day capacity and expertise in-house with the support of external agencies or consultants for evaluation of bigger pieces. 

The reason we say that is because — especially today when so much about marketing is about authenticity and deeply understanding your community and your issue — it's really hard to get an agency to have their finger on the pulse daily. The organization would have to be an agency’s only client to do that effectively. 

Some people might argue there are agencies that figure out how to do that well. We help our clients with ongoing marketing work, but we do it from more of a consultative and evaluation standpoint. We help give them the tools they need to do their marketing. We help build that capacity. We help advise on what kind of content they should be doing and in what channels, so that they’re fully set up and then we teach them to go. 

And then we evaluate how those efforts have panned out and advise them on how to make strategic shifts based on what we're seeing work. We're trying to teach them to fish. We’re not trying to just take it off their plates. 

Build Capacity as You Scale

What we often see happen is organizations say, “We know we need to do this. We know we need to be on these channels. We know we need to put stuff out consistently. But, we don't have the capacity to do that. Let's just bring someone on to just offload this to.” But in our experience, that’s not going to work. Lots of people have tried that and failed or if they haven't tried it, and they do try it, there's a high likelihood that it will fail.

Of course, it's not impossible. We’ve just seen that not work more times than it works. We believe strongly in marketing and that it should be something you're building capacity for — just like fundraising, just like your program work, just like organizational development or any other important core pillar of your work. And it's just striking a balance of deciding when you do it in-house or when you bring staff in for it. 

One of our clients hired a full-time photographer and videographer. That person is out there collecting content every single day as their job. That is a gold mine for that organization to have that content. 

This is the kind of decision that's really going to elevate your marketing, especially as you start to get closer to that $5M a year mark. 

Larger Organizations

Now, if we talk about organizations over $5M a year, that's where things really start to change. 

You're going to want to scale your team up and continue to build out even more in-house capacity. At this point, your marketing team should look like a small agency within your organization organized around brand-building and around marketing. You’ll still likely have an agency partner or even more likely multiple agency partners for different niche skill sets to help support your team. 

And the CEO or ED should still be involved, but a little bit more at an advisory level — unless that CEO or ED has built up their own skill and finds this to be quite valuable and decides that it’s still an important element of their day-to-day work. We've seen that work quite well.

CEOs and EDs have personas of their own. You have sales and marketing oriented CEOs and product and service oriented CEOs. So how involved they are in the marketing depends on the CEO at an organization this size. Once you're at that size, now you're starting to talk about having segmented marketing campaigns and efforts. You have your customer constituent marketing strategy and you have your donor or your investor-related strategy, and you have overlapping skill sets between these different sorts of subteams. At this point, build your dream team.

Build Out Your Team Based on the Skills Needed

The raw skill sets of an effective marketing team are the same across different organizational sizes. In some cases, one person has all these skills, and in other cases, multiple people have these skills and there's overlap. When you think about marketing team members, look for:

• Someone who really understands the numbers and who's going from marketing to sales or fundraising and managing that pipeline very, very closely.
• Someone who's a killer content creator — a producer of some sort who works with both the written and the visual.
• Someone who’s a stellar brand marketer and a leader who deeply understands the constituents and the problems and brings that knowledge and wisdom to the rest of the team and to the rest of the organization. 

When you’re building your social impact marketing team, make sure that you have those three core competencies covered.

Marketing Fuels Your Mission

If you’re a nonprofit, it’s easy to think of your marketing team as being separate from your program or advocacy work. Less so if you’re a social enterprise. Either way, it’s important that the culture of your organization recognizes the contribution that marketing has to achieving your mission. Marketing should be seen as a core business function that requires significant investment.

If you think that not enough supporters, funders, and advocates know who you are or are supporting your work, then you need to spend more time marketing. More time working to break through in the attention economy. More time telling your story and telling people why they should care about the challenges you’re addressing. That’s a path to building sustainable revenue that can power your mission, scale your impact, and bring greater benefits to the people and cause you serve.