When Marketing Becomes More Than Marketing
I’ve worked in marketing and communications across different organizations and industries.
But nothing has changed the way I think about marketing quite like working in child welfare and family services.
I’ve been doing this work for about two and a half years.
In the grand scheme of a 35-year-old organization, that’s not very long.
But it has been long enough to completely change the way I see my job.
Because when you work in marketing, you’re used to talking about things like reach.
Engagement.
Brand awareness.
Conversions.
Campaign performance.
Website traffic.
All of those things still matter.
But then you start working somewhere where the “content” is actually someone’s life.
And suddenly, the work feels different.
“There are stories I will never tell.”
That might sound strange coming from someone whose job involves storytelling.
But some of the stories that have impacted me the most are the ones I’ll never be able to share publicly.
I’ve learned about children who were hurt by the very people who were supposed to protect them.
Children whose parents are incarcerated.
Brothers and sisters removed from their homes and separated from each other because there wasn’t one foster home that could take them all.
Kids who have moved from home to home so many times that instability has started to feel normal.
Parents who lost custody of their children, hit rock bottom and somehow found the strength to fight their way back.
Students who struggled in traditional classrooms, were underestimated, and eventually walked across a graduation stage.
Children learning how to regulate emotions most adults would struggle to process.
And behind every one of those stories are people showing up.
Caseworkers.
Therapists.
Teachers.
Foster care teams.
Family specialists.
Recruiters.
Advocates.
People who walk alongside children and families during some of the hardest moments of their lives.
People who go home at the end of the day carrying pieces of those stories with them.
And then there’s me.
The marketer.
Trying to figure out how to tell people why this work matters.
“It changes the way you approach a campaign.”
When I’m working on a campaign now, I find myself trying to step outside of the marketing brain for a minute.
I think:
What if that were my child?
What if those were my siblings?
What if I didn’t know where I was going to sleep next?
What if the hardest thing I had ever lived through became someone else’s social media post?
That last one matters.
Because there is a person on the other side of every story we tell.
And they trusted us with it.
That responsibility is something I think about constantly.
Because this isn’t content.
These aren’t just numbers for an annual report.
These aren’t “success stories” we plug into a campaign.
They are people.
Real kids.
Real families.
Real stories.
And real employees who make this work possible.
“Marketing still has a job to do.”
We still need people to pay attention.
We still need awareness.
We still need engagement.
We still need strong brands and good creative and compelling campaigns.
We still need people to take action.
But sometimes that action means helping someone understand just how badly foster parents are needed.
Sometimes it means showing a family that help exists.
Sometimes it means celebrating a student who spent years believing they weren’t capable of succeeding in school.
Sometimes it means reminding a parent that the worst chapter of their life doesn’t necessarily have to be the last one.
Sometimes it means helping a donor understand what their support actually makes possible.
And sometimes it means telling a powerful story while knowing there are parts of it the public will never get to know.
Because protecting the person behind the story matters more than telling the perfect story.
“I see more than I can show.”
That’s probably the strangest part of doing this work.
Marketing often gets a front-row seat.
We interview people.
We hear the backstory.
We see the photos that never get posted.
We talk to the employees who were there.
We learn what happened before the happy ending.
And then we have to figure out how much of that story actually belongs to us to tell.
Sometimes the answer is very little.
And I’ve learned to be okay with that.
Because some stories don’t exist to become content.
Sometimes it’s enough that they changed the people who were lucky enough to hear them.
I know they’ve changed me.
“Two and a half years.”
I haven’t been here for all 35 years.
I can’t tell every story.
And there is still so much about this work that I’m learning.
But in two and a half years, my definition of marketing has gotten a lot bigger.
Yes, marketing is strategy.
It’s branding.
It’s storytelling.
It’s creativity.
It’s analytics.
It’s figuring out how to make people care.
But sometimes it’s also figuring out how to tell a story with dignity.
How to make people care without exploiting someone’s hardest moment.
How to celebrate a victory while respecting everything it took to get there.
How to give a voice to people without making their pain the product.
And how to remember that behind every metric on the report is an actual human being.
I don’t think I’ll ever look at marketing exactly the same way again.
Two and a half years may be a small part of a 35-year story.
But they’ve completely changed what marketing means to me.
And honestly?
I think they’ve made me a better marketer because of it.
