The Janine Teagues Problem: Building a Marketing Culture When You’re a Team of One
- Tanesha Ford
- Apr 5
- 5 min read
There’s a particular kind of optimism that lives in people like Janine Teagues.
If you’ve ever watched Abbott Elementary, you know exactly what I mean. It’s that belief that if you just care enough, try hard enough, stay late enough, you can hold a whole system together by sheer will.
I’ve met a lot of Janines in nonprofit arts organizations.
Sometimes, I’ve been her.
The team-of-one marketer who believes deeply in the mission, who says yes a little too quickly, who steps in to fix what isn’t technically theirs because it still affects the work. The one who thinks enthusiasm can stretch far enough to cover the gaps.
And for a while, it works. Until it doesn’t.
The School Is Not Broken. It’s Misaligned.
Abbott Elementary isn’t struggling because the teachers don’t care, nor because they aren’t skilled. It’s struggling because everyone is operating with different expectations, different pressures, and different definitions of success.
That’s what most nonprofit marketing environments look like, too.
I remember working in an organization where leadership programmed events based on what they thought the audience wanted—without research, without looking at past performance, and without any real system in place to learn from what had already happened. It wasn’t a lack of intelligence; it was a lack of structure. There was no real post-mortem process, no feedback loop, no pause to ask, “Did this actually work?”
At the same time, there was little to no consultation with marketing about scope, capacity, or budget before decisions were made. In a small organization where everyone is already doing the work of three people, timelines were aggressive, expectations were high, and I was expected to make it work—because that’s what I’ve always done.
And to be fair, the programming itself was layered and meaningful—the kind of work that could genuinely move people. That was never the issue. The issue was everything around it.
There wasn’t a separate operations function—leadership and I were operations. So I found myself in the middle, trying to take whatever pieces were actionable, translate ambition into something executable, stretch limited resources into full campaigns, and shape it all into a story the public could actually understand.
What I eventually realized is that what we often call “marketing chaos” isn’t chaos at all.
It’s misalignment—moving fast enough to look like urgency.
You Cannot Outwork a System That Was Never Built
This is the part where most team-of-one marketers get stuck.
You start thinking the solution is better planning on your part. Better time management. Better tools. Better messaging.
And, while yes, those things matter, they are not enough.
Because the real issue is that the organization has never been taught how marketing actually functions.
So what happens?
Campaigns start late because no one knew when marketing needed to be
involved.
Assets come in incomplete because no one understands what “ready” actually means.
Everything becomes urgent because there was no shared timeline to begin with.
And you become the buffer. The translator. The fixer. The last line of defense between a good idea and a public-facing experience.
This is not sustainable.
Culture Is Built in Meetings No One Thinks Are Important
Let’s talk about cross-department campaign meetings.
Not the rushed check-ins. Not the “quick 15-minute sync” that turns into confusion. Nor the unstructured marathon meetings, where the last two meetings were rehashed before moving on to new items.
I mean intentional space where marketing, programs, and leadership sit down early enough to shape something together. This, my dear reader, is where culture starts to shift. (Apologies, it couldn’t be helped.)
Because in those rooms, a few critical things happen. People begin to understand what marketing actually needs to do its job well. Marketing begins to understand the operational realities of the program. And most importantly, shared ownership starts to take root.
Instead of marketing being the final step, it becomes part of the process. That shift alone can prevent half of the last-minute chaos most teams experience. Not because people suddenly become perfect planners, but because expectations are no longer invisible.
Shared Language Is Not a Luxury.
One of the quietest barriers in nonprofit organizations is language. Everyone is using the same words.
Campaign.
Launch.
Audience.
Outreach.
And meaning completely different things.
When there is no shared language, everything takes longer. Feedback loops get messy, deadlines slip, and frustration builds (usually in silence, at first).
Building a culture of marketing means slowing down enough to define what these words actually mean in your organization.
What counts as a campaign?
When is something considered ready for promotion?
What is the timeline we are working with, not in theory but in practice?
This is the work that makes everything else function.
Preventing Chaos Is Not About Control
Let’s say that again for those of you in the back, “Preventing Chaos is Not about Control”. As a living, breathing control freak in recovery, I cannot say that enough!
Chaos can happen in your organization. It probably will. You can still produce results and protect your peace. You just have to plan and prepare first.
The goal is not to eliminate chaos.
That is not realistic in nonprofit arts spaces where funding shifts, timelines move, and creative work evolves.
The goal is to build enough structure that chaos does not take you down with it.
That looks like:
Clear campaign timelines that are shared across departments
Defined roles so you are not the default owner of everything
Agreed-upon checkpoints so nothing appears fully formed at the last minute
And boundaries. Real ones.
Building a culture of marketing also means deciding what you are not available to fix anymore.
Stop Trying to Be the Hero Teacher
Janine’s biggest lesson is that caring without structure burns you out and doesn’t actually fix the system.
The same is true here.
You do not need to be the hero of your organization’s marketing. You need to be the person who helps the organization understand that marketing is a shared responsibility. That shift is slower.
It requires more conversations. More repetition. More patience than just doing it yourself.
It is the only thing that lasts, and it brings a different kind of win.
It’s a successful campaign, yes, AND…
It’s a program lead bringing you in earlier because they understand the timeline and leadership asking better questions, even if they don’t have all the answers yet, and fewer emergencies that could have been avoided.
And most importantly, it’s you, not carrying everything alone.
These are not small wins. They are signals that the system is starting to hold.
So Ends Act One of "The Alignment Series"
This first stretch was about helping small nonprofit arts organizations get their internal footing so they can make big things happen without burning out the people holding it all together.
Alignment is not flashy work, but it is the work that makes everything else possible.
And now we move into Act Two, where things get a little more exciting and, if we are being honest, a little more complex. This is where the real tension lives. This is where artistic vision meets audience reality, where season announcements carry more politics than people admit, where challenging work asks for stronger messaging instead of softer edges, and where conversations about pricing, access, and community become unavoidable.
This section is going to push us into deeper, more strategic territory because this is where alignment gets tested in real time. If you have been following along, stay with me.
Like, subscribe, and follow so you can keep building with us as we step into the part of the work that asks more of us and gives more back.
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