A growing ministry was launching six campaigns a year with no in-house designer. Each one started from scratch, ran late, and looked like it belonged to a different organization. We built the system that changed that.
Faith-based nonprofit · 24 staff · 6 major campaigns per year
Every campaign — Easter, back-to-school, giving Tuesday, year-end — started with the same conversation: what colors are we using, where are last year's files, and who can design the social graphics by Friday? The team was spending more time recreating than creating.
The communications lead had built a Canva folder that mostly worked. It just wasn't a system — nothing carried across web, print, and email, and no one knew which version was current.
We inventoried every campaign asset shipped in the last 18 months, sorted them by what actually got used, and threw out everything that didn't. What remained told us the real system — the one the team had been building without naming it.
Two type styles. Three colors. Six page layouts. Four social templates. One email template. Rules for photography. That's the whole system.
A tight kit is one a two-person team can hold in their head. A big one becomes a museum no one visits.
Web templates in their CMS. Social templates in Canva. Email templates in their ESP. Print templates in Google Docs and Canva Print. Nothing that required learning new software. Nothing that broke when a staff member left.
A single page — a laminated copy sits by every workstation — covers colors, type, spacing rules, and the three things to never do. New hires can absorb it in five minutes. Board volunteers can follow it well enough to ship.
The first campaign after rollout shipped in nine days end-to-end. The next five shipped without a single freelance design invoice — the first year the org didn't need one. Campaign-to-campaign visual consistency, measured by an outside consultant, jumped from "fragmented" to "clearly one organization."
The team stopped dreading campaign kickoffs. That was the outcome we cared about most.
“For the first time, launching a campaign feels like assembling something — not inventing it.”