Here is a saying familiar to many of us: stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.

For so many small and mid-sized nonprofits, especially those rooted in racial and social justice, communications can sometimes happen in the margins. It’s the last-minute email before an event, the rushed statement when there’s a crisis, the Instagram post squeezed in between grant reports and a community meeting. You are doing the best you can with what you have. And still, it often feels like you’re always scrambling and never quite catching up.

This piece is an invitation to step out of scramble mode and into something more grounded and sustainable: proactive communications that amplify consistent stories and messages to build narrative power, strengthen your organizational alignment and move audiences to action, and help you stay ready for whatever comes next.

What communications really holds in your organization

Before we talk strategy, it helps to name what communications for nonprofit organizations actually includes. Most of us think of tactics when we think about communications – should we launch a TikTok? How often should we update our website? How many emails should we send in a month? Do we still do press releases?

But, first, let’s take a step back and consider how communications can strategically provide support across an organization or effort. Whether an organization has a full-time comms team or a single person doing this off the side of their desk, communications supports these four core priorities:

  1. Internal communication: keeping staff and board informed, aligned, and moving in the same direction.
  2. Brand and reputation: positioning how your organization shows up in the world, what people associate with your name, and how trusted you are.
  3. Program, organizing and policy advocacy communication: explaining your work, sharing impact, building your base, moving people to take action on campaigns, and winning policy priorities.
  4. Fundraising communication: inviting people into giving, reporting back to funders and donors, and making a clear, compelling case for investment.

In an ideal world, these pieces are connected and intentional. In reality, for many justice-focused orgs, they’re scattered across inboxes, Google Docs, and staff brains.

Why we end up in scramble mode

Here is the reality. If you are an executive director, on the programs team, or organizer, your days are likely full before you even add “communications” to the list. You are juggling fundraising and development deadlines, program design and delivery, fighting to shape policy priorities at the local, statewide or federal level, relationships with community members and partners, and responding to attacks, backlash, and harm facing your people.

On top of that, there’s the daily noise: emails, social feeds, media cycles, disinformation, and the expectation that your organization will respond to every headline that touches your issue. It’s a lot.

The result is that many teams live in reactive mode. You are constantly racing to get a statement out before the news cycle passes; throwing together talking points for a staff member right before a panel; sending an urgent fundraising email to donors because of a funding cut; and trying to manage a social media presence by posting whenever you can grab a moment.

There is very little time to step back, to plan, or to ask if all this activity is actually adding up to the story we want to tell?

If this is where you are, there is nothing wrong with you or your organization. You’re operating in a system that underfunds communications, especially for Black-, Indigenous-, and people-of-color-led organizations, and expects you to be both on the frontlines and perfectly polished. Proactive communications is one way we push back against that.

What “proactive” means for racial and social justice nonprofits

When I talk about proactive communications, I don’t mean churning out more content or sticking to a rigid calendar no matter what is happening in the world.

In the context of the organizations we work with, proactive communications is about:

  • Building narrative power by shaping the story about your people, your issues, and your solutions, controlling the terms of the debate, instead of only reacting to or reinforcing  harmful narratives.
  • Winning systems change by using your voice and visibility to move policy, culture, and resources in the direction of justice.
  • Advancing your thought leadership, reaching the audiences who matter most, and making sure the right people hear from you in ways that feel relevant and trustworthy.
  • Strengthening your organization by using communications to support fundraising, partnerships, recruitment, and retention.

At its core, proactive communications is about trust and transparency. When you share what you’re doing, why it matters, and how decisions are made – consistently, not just in crisis – you build a reservoir of trust with your community, staff, and supporters. That trust is one of the strongest predictors of nonprofit impact and resilience. It is also one of your greatest protections when something goes wrong.

What “good enough” looks like

A lot of people hear “proactive communications strategy” and picture a 40-page document with charts, color codes, and five-year projections. A hard lesson for me as a consultant has been that for small and mid-sized orgs, that kind of plan usually ends up on a virtual shelf, never to be opened again. “Good enough” looks very different and much more doable.

A solid, proactive comms plan for the next three to six months starts with clear communications goals that ladder up to your organization’s fundraising, program, organizing and advocacy goals. If your fundraising goal is to grow individual giving, your communications goals might include deepening donor understanding of your impact and inviting more people into recurring gifts. If your program or advocacy goals are to expand a campaign or service, your communications goals might focus on mobilizing your base, strengthening partnerships, or influencing a specific decision maker.

From there, a good enough plan includes three simple pieces:

Clear audiences: Name 2-3 priority groups you need to reach. For example, base/community members, current and potential donors, and a specific policymaker or sector audience. What do each of these audiences need to hear from you, in this moment, in order to act, trust, and stay connected? What values do you share? Who do they listen to? What are their motivations for getting engaged, and what stands in their way?

Clear channel choices: For each audience, choose the 1-2 channels that most realistically reach them. For example, community meetings and WhatsApp for your base; email and Instagram for donors; briefing memos and op-eds for policymakers. This keeps you from trying to be everywhere at once and burning out your team. I remember one coaching client who thought she needed to do a full communications campaign to reach a set number of judges to advance her organization’s program. In the end, we determined all we really needed to do was get on the phone with them directly and try to move them – a cheaper and time efficient way to make progress.

A clear roadmap: Pull it together into an action plan of strategies and tactics that you can use to communicate to each audience over the next quarter, tied to real-world milestones like a campaign launch, budget vote, or community gathering. This can live as a Google Doc or a spreadsheet that your team actually uses and updates.

A communications maturity ladder

To make this more tangible, I find it helpful to think in stages using a communications maturity ladder. You might recognize your organization in one of these four stages:

  1. Ad hoc
    • Communications is happening, but without any real planning; it also happens when someone has time or when there’s a fire.
    • Social posts, emails, and statements are tactical and aren’t connected to a bigger message.
    • Different staff share different messages about who you are and what you do.
  2. Planned
    • You have a basic, short-term plan, maybe a content calendar for a campaign or quarter.
    • You’ve named your main audiences and key messages.
    • Not everything is consistent, but you’re no longer inventing everything from scratch.
  3. Optimized 
    • Communications is not only planned, but also funded and staffed with capacity.
    • You have dedicated time and staffing, even if shared.
    • Narrative, program, advocacy, and fundraising messages are aligned.
    • You’re paying attention to what works: measuring open rates, engagement, feedback – and tying it to your organizational goals.
  4. Culture of communication
    • Communications is strategic and a shared practice across the organization, starting with leadership.
    • Staff and board understand the story you’re telling and their role in it.
    • You have regular rhythms – like storytelling check-ins at staff meetings and debriefs after major moments – so you’re always learning and refining.

The point is not to jump from Ad hoc to Culture overnight, but to move one step up the ladder in the areas that matter most right now.

A few concrete examples:

  • An immigrant justice organization decides on three narrative priorities for the year and builds all their major communications around those themes.
  • A youth-serving organization moves from scattered social posts to a quarterly plan that includes a monthly story about a young person (with consent), a regular policy update, and a recurring donor touchpoint.
  • A grassroots coalition invests in a part-time communications lead whose job is to maintain shared messaging for the coalition and coordinate rapid responses grounded in agreed values.

Each of these is a step up the ladder. When you stay ready – by clarifying your story, focusing your audiences and channels, and building a culture of communication – you don’t have to scramble in the same way when the spotlight suddenly turns your direction. You may still feel the urgency and the pressure. But you’ll be responding from a place of clarity, not chaos.

Important Note – The role of foundations in funding communications

Foundations have an enormous role to play in whether proactive communications is possible for their grantees. And when funders invest in proactive strategic communications, they’re contributing to narrative power across an ecosystem.

Too often, grants fund a specific campaign, report, or event without resourcing the core communications infrastructure that makes those moments effective. Organizations are under attack, operating in volatile conditions, and being asked to represent entire communities. More than ever, communications is not a “nice to have” – it is core infrastructure that deserves the time, staffing, and resources that can make more proactive communications possible.