Marketing Alignment

What happens when bold artistic vision stops being legible to the very people it’s meant to serve? This piece explores the quiet disconnect between intention and audience, and why clarity is not a compromise.

If your marketing only works when you overextend yourself, that’s not a strategy, it’s a signal. This piece explores what it really takes to build a culture of marketing inside small nonprofit arts organizations so the work doesn’t depend on one person holding everything together.

We’re in week four of the 14-week Alignment Series, looking at the real pain points small nonprofit arts organizations run into and the opportunities sitting right beside them, especially when it comes to how we talk about marketing with the folks leading the organization.

A crowded ballroom can look like success, but it doesn’t tell you who’s coming back for a second dance. Too often, nonprofit marketing reports focus on volume over relationship. The real question is who stayed, who engaged, and who chose you again. If your metrics can’t answer that, they’re not guiding strategy; they’re just filling the room.

Many nonprofit arts teams spend a lot of time explaining why their organizations don’t grow the way corporate businesses do. Not because they lack strategy, but because the ecosystem works differently. Revenue comes from multiple streams moving at different speeds. Audiences behave more like communities than customers. And growth often happens in waves, not neat quarterly lines. When we understand that, the conversation about marketing—and success—starts to change.