What 2.5 Years Can Change
Two and a half years doesn’t sound like that long.
Until you look backward.
When I made the jump from for-profit marketing to nonprofit marketing two and a half years ago, I thought I knew what I was walking into.
I did not.
I knew marketing. I knew how to build campaigns and understand an audience. I knew how to look at the numbers and obsess over whether something was actually working.
I did not know anything about foster care.
Or child welfare.
Or treatment foster care.
Or kinship.
Or why everyone seemed to communicate exclusively in acronyms.
I also inherited an 8-terabyte hard drive.
That should have been my first warning.
Somewhere on that thing was basically the archaeological history of the Marketing department. There were old logos, flyers from every era, duplicate files, materials that hadn’t been updated in five-plus years and things I’m fairly certain no living person knew existed.
Looking back now, that hard drive is actually a pretty good metaphor for where we were.
There was so much good stuff there.
It just needed someone to figure out what we were keeping, what needed to change and where we were going next.
From for-profit to mission-first
Before coming to Arrow Child & Family Ministries, most of my marketing experience had been in the for-profit world.
Marketing made sense to me there.
Find the audience.
Build the campaign.
Generate the lead.
Look at the numbers.
Figure out what worked.
Do it again.
Then I walked into nonprofit marketing and realized everything I knew still applied, but the purpose behind it felt completely different.
There wasn’t one product.
There wasn’t one customer.
And the goal wasn’t revenue.
Suddenly, I was thinking about people considering becoming foster parents. I was thinking about families looking for services. There were donors and employees. Parents, community partners, volunteers and the media.
Everyone needed something different from us.
And I was learning that a “conversion” could mean someone filling out a form to learn about becoming a foster parent.
Success could mean helping a family discover a service they didn’t know existed.
Or it could mean telling a story well enough that someone finally understood why this work matters.
I wasn’t marketing a product anymore.
I was marketing a mission.
I learned pretty quickly that mission-driven marketing isn’t less sophisticated than for-profit marketing.
If anything, it can be more complicated.
Because when the thing you’re marketing involves real kids and families during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, getting the message right matters.
A lot.
The before.
When I look back at a presentation I gave at AFP Houston in 2025, I had an entire slide dedicated to the challenges we were facing.
“Outdated branding & lack of identity.”
“No Marketing Plan.”
And my personal favorite:
The “Hope it Sticks” method.
That pretty much sums it up.
Make something.
Put it somewhere.
Hope people see it.
Then move on to the next thing.
The organization itself wasn’t outdated. The work happening inside of it was incredible.
But the way we were presenting that work hadn’t always kept pace.
Some materials hadn’t been updated in more than five years. Our branding wasn’t always consistent. Our digital presence and website needed serious attention.
Marketing had also become a little bit of a catch-all.
Need a flyer?
Marketing.
Need a sign?
Marketing.
Need something printed?
Marketing.
Need a random document formatted?
Marketing.
Need something and you’re not entirely sure who handles it?
Apparently…
Marketing.
At one point, our ticketing system was averaging somewhere between two and ten requests a day, and plenty of them weren’t actually marketing requests.
I realized pretty quickly that making things prettier wasn’t going to fix this.
We had to change the way Marketing worked.
Eventually, we also had to change the way people thought about Marketing.
So we started rebuilding.
Not rebranding.
Rebuilding.
There’s a difference.
A rebrand can change what something looks like.
We needed to change the infrastructure underneath it.
So we started with the things nobody sees.
Processes.
We rebuilt our ticketing system and created actual priorities.
We documented processes and created resources people could use without immediately submitting a ticket.
We built marketing calendars.
We started planning instead of constantly reacting.
We audited years of materials.
We built a Print Shop.
We built a Swag Store after discovering that more than $100,000 had been spent on unnecessary swag and business cards.
Then we started tackling that 8TB hard drive.
Our entire marketing portfolio needed attention.
So we went through it.
And went through it.
And went through it.
We updated old collateral and retired what we didn’t need.
We created digital versions.
We standardized our language.
We built brand guidelines and addressed accessibility.
We started creating consistency around how we showed up.
And we began asking a question that sounds incredibly simple now:
Does this actually look like us?
Because sometimes the answer was…
not really.
Yes, we changed the logo.
Changing a logo sounds like a fun little branding project until you realize the logo is on…
everything.
The old logo had been around for a long time. It was recognizable, but it was wordy and difficult to use in certain applications. It also wasn’t built for the increasingly digital world we were moving toward.
So we modernized it.
Then came the small task of changing it everywhere.
The website.
Marketing materials.
Presentations and signage.
Business cards.
Internal documents.
Building graphics.
Things hidden inside that 8TB hard drive.
Things we didn’t know existed until someone randomly sent one to us six months later.
Changing the logo became less of a branding exercise and more of an organizational scavenger hunt.
But it was never really about the logo.
It was about identity.
We had programs serving completely different people in completely different ways. They didn’t need identical marketing strategies, but they did need to feel like they belonged to the same organization.
Slowly, they started to.
And then there was the website.
Ohhhhhhh, the website.
We initially set out to modernize it.
Then we started looking under the hood.
The backend had issues.
The user experience needed work.
Programs had evolved faster than the website.
Information wasn’t always easy to find.
What began as “let’s update the website” turned into essentially reconstructing the website.
We rebuilt navigation and created new program pages.
We worked through backend issues.
We incorporated person-first language and made information easier to follow.
We created a stronger place for news and stories.
But the biggest shift wasn’t technical.
It was changing the way we thought about the person on the other side of the screen.
Someone considering becoming a foster parent shouldn’t need to understand our organizational chart to figure out what to do next.
A parent looking for a school shouldn’t have to dig.
Someone who has never heard of us should be able to land on the website and understand what we do and where they fit.
When the reconstructed site finally launched, seeing the old website next to the new one was one of those rare moments when I stopped long enough to think:
Holy crap. We really did change this.
Then, naturally, I immediately started thinking about what we needed to change next.
Because looking better wasn’t enough.
This is probably where my for-profit marketing brain never left.
I wanted numbers.
I wanted to know what worked and what didn’t.
I wanted to know what happened after someone clicked.
When I first came into the organization, meaningful Marketing reporting was extremely limited.
And that meant a successful marketing effort could essentially be:
“We posted it.”
Okay…
Then what happened?
Did people see it?
Did they click?
Did they fill out a form?
Did they inquire?
Did the campaign actually do what we wanted it to do?
Over time, our conversations started changing.
We started talking about analytics and SEO.
We got more serious about digital advertising and conversions.
Then came Google Ad Grants, HubSpot and Power BI.
Streaming and CTV entered the conversation.
So did campaign attribution.
Things that weren’t part of our everyday Marketing conversations when I started became part of how we operated.
We stopped only asking:
What are we making?
And started asking:
Why are we making it? Who is it for? How will we know if it worked?
That shift might not make the prettiest before-and-after picture.
But it’s one of the changes I’m most proud of.
Then we started telling the stories that were already there.
This one means the most to me.
The organization has been doing incredible work for decades.
The stories were always there.
We just weren’t telling enough of them.
From roughly 2013 through 2023, around 150 stories were published.
Since 2024?
We’ve published 163.
More stories in roughly two and a half years than during approximately the previous decade.
That still blows my mind.
They are stories about kids and families.
Stories about foster parents.
Stories about employees and the work happening every day that people outside of this world would otherwise never know about.
We made Communications a real part of the Marketing function.
Storytelling became intentional.
So did media outreach and PR.
Instead of only telling people what we do, we started showing them why it matters.
Eventually, that philosophy made its way into something else.
Our annual report.
We made an annual report people might actually want to read.
I didn’t want another annual report that checked all the annual-report boxes.
You know the kind.
Letter.
Numbers.
Chart.
More numbers.
Another chart.
Everyone works incredibly hard on it and then approximately four people actually read the thing.
We wanted ours to feel different.
We wanted the people behind the numbers to actually be part of it.
We wanted cleaner design.
Most importantly, we wanted something that felt like us.
So we made one.
And then something happened that would’ve been pretty difficult for me to imagine while digging through an 8TB hard drive full of outdated marketing materials.
We became award-winning.
AMA Houston recognized our work as Best Nonprofit Annual Report.
And that one meant something to me.
Not just because we won an award.
But because I knew the before.
I knew what our materials looked like when I started.
I knew how many things had to change before we could create work like that.
I knew how many conversations it took to explain why consistency mattered.
Why storytelling mattered.
Why we needed data.
Why Marketing needed to be involved before someone needed the flyer.
I knew how many drafts there were.
I knew how many tiny decisions went into it.
And I knew how many times I probably drove my team insane saying:
“I don’t love it yet.”
Suddenly, the work we were creating wasn’t just different from what we’d done before.
It was being recognized outside of our organization.
That felt pretty damn cool.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped being “the flyer people.”
Don’t get me wrong.
We still make flyers.
So. Many. Flyers.
I have accepted that there will always be flyers.
But the conversations are different now.
We talk about SEO and digital strategy.
We talk about PR.
We talk about conversions and analytics.
We talk about the website as part of the strategy instead of just a place to put information.
We talk about audiences before we talk about graphics.
We build campaigns instead of just creating individual pieces.
We ask questions before we start designing.
We use data to make decisions.
We’re building systems that don’t require someone to reinvent the wheel every time we do something.
We’re becoming proactive instead of reactive.
And we’re still figuring it out.
Because 2.5 years changed me, too.
That’s the part I don’t think I realized until I started writing this.
I thought I was changing a Marketing department.
I didn’t realize how much the job would change me.
I came into nonprofit marketing knowing how to be a marketer.
Then I had to learn how to lead.
Eventually, I had to learn how to lead people who were becoming leaders themselves.
I’ve had to learn that being responsible for something doesn’t mean personally doing all of it.
That one is still a work in progress.
I’ve had to learn how to give people ownership and actually trust them with it.
I’ve had to learn how to let someone solve a problem differently than I would.
I’ve learned when an idea is worth fighting for.
And I’ve learned that sometimes you just have to let something go.
I’ve learned that “we’ve always done it this way” doesn’t mean it’s the best way.
But I’ve also learned that change can’t just be bulldozed through because you think you have a better idea.
You have to listen.
You have to understand why something existed in the first place.
You have to build trust.
And sometimes you have to make a PowerPoint.
Actually…
I’ve learned that sometimes you have to make a lot of PowerPoints.
The work nobody sees.
People see the new logo and the website.
They see the campaigns.
They see the annual report and the award.
They don’t see everything between those things.
The rejected concepts.
The spreadsheets and process documents.
The tickets.
The reporting.
The website meetings.
The uncomfortable conversations.
The tiny changes that didn’t feel transformational while we were making them.
The trial and error.
The things we launched that worked and the things that absolutely did not.
The moment something finally clicks and everyone wonders why we didn’t do it that way all along.
That’s the work between the before and the after.
And when you’re living inside of it every day, it’s really easy to miss how much is actually changing.
Two and a half years later.
We’re not finished.
Thank God.
I don’t think good Marketing ever is.
There are still things I want to rebuild.
There are systems I want to improve.
There are campaigns I want to try.
There are ideas sitting in my notes that I am patiently waiting for someone to give me a budget for.
There are probably files on that 8TB hard drive that we still haven’t discovered.
And every once in a while, a ticket comes through that makes me stare at my computer and ask:
How in the world is this Marketing?
Some things never change.
But a lot has.
The logo changed.
The website was rebuilt.
Years of marketing materials were modernized.
We built processes and started measuring what we were doing.
We told more stories.
We built campaigns.
We built a team.
And yes, we won an award.
But when I look back now, those aren’t really the things I think about most.
I think about how different the conversations are.
How different our expectations are.
How much more we’re willing to question.
How much I’ve had to learn.
And how much I still have left to learn.
Sometimes you’re so busy looking at everything that still needs to be done that you forget to turn around.
Two and a half years doesn’t sound like that long.
Until you look backward.
And realize just how much can change in between.
