Messaging Strategy
for Nonprofits

Authentic Messaging Matters. We’ll Help You Get It Right.

Our team of expert strategists and copywriters will use your brand’s strategy as the foundation to develop focused messaging and turnkey assets that ensure your brand is putting its best foot forward every time.

You Know Who You Are,
But Do Others?

One of the primary ways audiences get to know your brand is through what you communicate. Effective messaging allows you to articulate who you are accurately and consistently over time, resulting in better understanding, more trust, and deeper connections with your organization’s mission.

88% of people say authenticity is a key for deciding which brands they support.
Consistent brand presentation has been shown to increase revenue by 33%.
It takes at least 7 repetitions for audiences to retain a given message.

Grow Brand Awareness

Consistent messaging helps audiences understand (and remember!) who you are and what you’re about.

Stay True to Who You Are

Ensure that what you say reflects who you are with messaging that aligns with your brand’s identity.

Stand Out From the Crowd

Help audiences understand what makes your organization unique.

Empower Brand Ambassadors

Equip stakeholders with turnkey assets they can use to promote your brand effectively.

Our Process

Phase 1
Discovery + Research

We begin each project by conducting a meeting with stakeholders to discuss your brand’s goals, background, challenges, etc. From there, we’ll analyze your audiences as well as the messaging of similar brands to inform our strategy.

Phase 2
Messaging Strategy

We will develop and present a comprehensive messaging strategy that includes competitive insights, audiences, messaging objectives, key messages, tone of voice recommendations, and messaging opportunities.

Phase 3
Messaging Assets

Using your approved messaging strategy as a foundation, we will develop turnkey assets your organization can use for a wide range of marketing activities. These assets may include an elevator pitch, brand story, taglines, talking points, and more depending on your organization’s needs.

Ready to Elevate Your Messaging?

We’d love to learn more about your organization and its goals. To begin, simply fill out and submit the form and one of our team members will reach out to you shortly.

Get Started

Kind Words From Our Clients

“It’s been a joy to work with Green Gate. It’s their professionalism. Their listening. Their ability to help distill our identity and then imaginatively share it with the world. The Green Gate team has helped us find our future!”

The Right Rev. Robert Wright
Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta
“I am incredibly grateful to Green Gate for teaching me about what was possible when it comes to communicating our mission, our stories.”

Staci Fox
Former President & CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast
“Green Gate’s creativity and expertise have been invaluable to Emmaus House. Green Gate pays close attention to detail, meets deadlines, and is a joy to work with. I highly recommend them.”

Greg Cole
Former Executive Director at Emmaus House

Frequently Asked Questions

Nonprofit communications are complex. In addition to communicating with multiple audiences that are all very different from one another (i.e. donors, program participants, staff, and volunteers), the work you’re communicating about is often equally complex, involving multiple programs that each address the issue from a different angle.
Most nonprofits develop their messaging with short-term objectives in mind, whether it’s to raise money, encourage applications, or attract volunteers. But this fragmented approach to messaging winds up creating more confusion than clarity, pulling your communications in so many directions that it becomes impossible to hold a clear and strategic position in audiences’ minds.

Effective messaging forms a critical link between your brand strategy and your communications, allowing you to communicate consistently about short-term objectives while also supporting your desired positioning.
Studies show that it takes audiences 4-6 repetitions to retain a message. Messaging helps you identify which messages need to be repeated and how.
Not typically. Messaging forms the connective tissue between your brand strategy and communications. If your brand strategy is who you are, messaging includes the ideas, perspectives, and knowledge that inform what you say—including knowledge about your audiences.
That said, our messaging deliverables do include a collection of turnkey assets that distill your messaging into copy you can use to streamline content creation.
Using your brand strategy—and specifically, your positioning—as a foundation, our messaging service includes two deliverables: a comprehensive messaging strategy and a collection of turnkey messaging assets.
The messaging strategy includes refined messaging objectives, audience profiles, key messages, and tone of voice guidelines.
The messaging assets vary depending on the organization and its needs, but might include an elevator pitch, brand story, taglines, talking points, and more. We also include detailed instructions for how to use each of these deliverables to plan effective communications and streamline content creation.
We work with nonprofits, educational institutions, social enterprises, and other mission-driven organizations ranging in size and staffing structure. Our clients have revenues ranging from under $1m to over $100m per year. All projects, including messaging, require a designated point of contact from your organization to review and approve our work.
Green Gate is a brand and marketing agency that works with nonprofits and is known for incorporating insightful strategy with award-winning design and storytelling. In addition to brand development services, we offer strategy consultations, messaging and content strategy, fundraising campaigns, and website redesign. To learn more about our list of services, visit our Services Page.
As a brand development agency, we believe the most important factor in nonprofits’ long-term success is trust. This is important for consumer brands as well; but unlike consumer brands, the value nonprofits provide isn’t based on a specific product or transaction. Instead, it’s based entirely on trust.
Our services are designed to cultivate trust by building and supporting authentic nonprofit brands. Authenticity occurs when your values, appearance, words, and actions are all in alignment. Our services are designed to build that alignment one piece at a time.
For that reason, we typically recommend nonprofits begin with their brand identity—that is, who they are both visibly and intrinsically. From there, we move on to what they say (messaging), and, finally, to public-facing assets and marketing (such as a website, campaigns, and ongoing communications).
There is no set track or prerequisite for most of our services—we’re happy to work with whatever foundation you have in place. But for organizations that haven’t had the opportunity to address these fundamentals—or for those in the midst of a significant change—we recommend beginning with the foundation, as this will ensure a greater return on every investment you make in the future.