Nonprofit Marketing & Communications Team Role Planner [Resource]
I’d guess most people who have worked on a marketing and communications team can identify with this experience: you look around at your team and realize there are some key competencies that are not staffed, and not all team members have the opportunity to work to their strengths.
I’ve been in this situation a few times, and over time developed this team role planning tool that I’m sharing here today. This tool is based on my experience working on marketing and communications teams in the nonprofit sector.
There are some notes included below about how to use the planner. If you’d like to get an editable version of the slide, reach out and I’ll be glad to share it.
These are the underlying ideas behind this role planner:
a nonprofit marketing and communications team has a variety of channels that need to be staffed
there are also several functional areas of focus that need to be staffed
teams will have some members with more career experience, and some members who are earlier in their careers
In this planner, each channel and each functional focus has two roles connected to it:
The first, blue square describes a more experienced team member who can take responsibility for setting strategy and mapping out future development of that channel or focus area. This more experience staff person would likely manage the work of any external contractors or earlier-career team members, which leads us to …
The second, green square, which would be staffed by a team member earlier in their career who is responsible for the day-to-day management of the channel or focus area.
A few important notes:
This is not a model that requires 18 or more team members! One team member can and likely will cover multiple different boxes. For example, on a small team, you may have one team member serving as the product owner and strategist across ALL of your digital channels.
Watch out for situations where you have a channel or functional focus without strategist team member identified (even if that person in the “strategist” role is simply the team leader).
Depending on the organization’s work, there may be multiple sets of “Program” marketing responsibilities. For example, larger organizations may need strategists and managers dedicated to functional areas for collaboration with a fundraising team, an advocacy team, or a membership department.
