Brand Refresh

Habitat for Humanity

JUMP DOWN TO:
Content Audit • Collateral Creation • New Value Proposition •
Account Cultivation • Event Management • VIP & Media Relations

As Development Director of a top national affiliate of the #1 nonprofit brand, I partnered with the CEO on fundraising. She handled major donor gifts, while I was in charge of getting corporate, faith, and in-kind materials donations.

As one of two remaining staff after cuts to an originally 8-person development team, I also backfilled marketing, communications, grantwriting, web design, and social media functions. I applied my training in content strategy & digital storytelling to these responsibilities.

GOALS: Maintain and grow funding levels, expand donor base, increase local brand familiarity.

AUDIENCE: Public, corporate and faith donors, volunteers, event/luncheon attendees.

SKILLS: Strategic Communications, Content Strategy, Content Design, Content Audits, Writing & Editing, UX Writing, Microcopy, Web Design, Graphic Design, Data Visualization, Image Curation, Stakeholder management, Relationship stewardship.

RESULTS

70%
GROWTH IN CORPORATE FUNDING

2.5x

INCREASE IN TOP-DONOR INVESTMENT

Content Audit

As a longstanding, well-recognized nonprofit brand, we faced a perception problem: People thought we "gave away homes to poor people." This misconcpetion created a ceiling in the number and type of people and organizations that wanted to engage with us.

To explore how our self-presentation might be reinforcing these limiting ideas, I performed a content audit & analysis on our digital presence. My findings on our narrative arc, channel strategy, and content governance were implemented, guiding the examples down this page.

Audit Process

Focused on our website, social media channels, and SaaS platforms we used (like the volunteer signup portal)
Used third party tools to crawl our digital properties, finding over 1,000 pages - most of which had been abandoned.
Narrowed focus to our 30 most-visited pages, to concentrate further analysis.
Further analysis with 3rd-party tools included:
- sentiment analysis
- self-vs-other weighting
- writing grade level
- terminology consistency
- text/image balance
Researched and sketched out five user personae to evaluate content performance against
- (due to time constraints, only 2 personae were fully developed)
Built an in-depth user persona profile, specifically looking at messaging hooks and settings that would be effective the user.
Looked at and proposed new linking strategy, information architecture, consolidation and new content areas.

AUDIT STEPS & RESOURCES

User Personae

User Lifecycle

User Journey Map

Org Messaging Hierarchy

Audit Findings & Recommendations

Pain Points Identified

Unclear/vague direction

We were dialing it in when it came to social media, rather than being strategic.

This meant other nonprofits serving the same populations were winning locally.

Conveying the wrong things

Onsite photo opportunities of volunteers doing construction outnumber moments with homeowner famiiles 8.4:1.

This led to photo feeds dominated by volunteers, which positioned them as the main characters in our story.

Governance: Story Sources

To see what was behind these pain points, I took a look at who in the affiliate had the ability to write and post stories about Habitat externally. While we had a lot of great content from various audiences (including our homeowner families)—it either wasn't reaching publication because of an approval bottleneck, or it was bypassing review altogether.

I suggested a new content/approval flow that allowed more of the great content to get out there, while applying a strategic balance to tell to a consistent brand story.

BEFORE

AFTER

Narrative Arc

One issue revealed by the analysis was this Habitat was leaning on its brand, which allowed storytelling and writing to focus on ourselves as the hero, which can be off-putting. This blocked promoting the more emotionally resonant and nuanced benefits of the Habitat model.

Using the Story Scaffold model of Character > Barrier > Hero/Catalyst > Resolution, I illustrated the source of our brand stagnation problems. As a fix, I rearranged the elements and proposed positioning the home itself as the hero that was making the difference in homeowner families' lives.

This made our story more welcoming and inviting to multiple stakeholder types. After exec approval of this approach, I began writing and editing all outgoing content to shift this emphasis.

BEFORE

Habitat (ourselves) as Hero

AFTER

Home as Hero – made possible by many stakeholders, including us.

Channel Strategy

Once our core story was reframed, we now had the opportunity to reintroduce it to our audiences - which were not all the same.

Having researched & identified our five main user personae, I crafted a channel strategy that targetted custom micro-framing of content based on channels/entry points.

Collateral Creation

Site Spec Sheet

Sponsorship Package

Build Event Flyer

Working with newly-issued style guidance from HFH International, I envisioned a set of new materials for corporate and faith donors. These included our first-ever site spec sheets, promo flyers for site build events, and a 14-page sponsorship packet.

The content backbone of the new materials were strategic packaging, buy-in prices, and benefits for the various group investment options, which I structured. I also envisioned, curated graphics, wrote all content, and graphic-designed all the new materials.

New Value Proposition

A whitepaper on the financial empowerment aspect of Habitat for banks & insurers

click to view

While many companies supported HFH, we noticed banks and insurance companies were focused on funding "financial literacy" programs. As a housing org, they assumed Habitat didn't fit their criteria..

Knowing that Habitat doesn't give away homes, but sets affordable mortgages for low-income families, I did a literature review on homeownership to convey the financially empowering impacts.

The result was a 15-page whitepaper that helped unlock a new sector of finance funders and grow our corporate funding by 70%.

"Imagine a financial literacy program where 99.3% of participants graduated, having saved nest eggs averaging $82,000. Results like that would make headlines. However, hidden behind the finished homes built by Habitat for Humanity is exactly such a model—built in from our inception...."

VIP & Media Relations

Staff emails. To convey survey results and leadership's commitment to self-reflection and improvement around DEI, I drafted a series of all-staff messages on behalf of the executive team and newly-formed health equity council.

Intranet. Together with the survey and a set of grounding texts proposed by the council, these comprised substantial content -- deeper than just statements of solidarity -- that formed the backbone of a new intranet page I designed, focused on our ongoing DEI work. This initial design was

This page is still under construction. More content to come.

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