Your Marketing Team Is Being Asked to Fix a Problem That Looks a Lot Like Waystar Royco
- Tanesha Ford
- Mar 7
- 4 min read
If you’ve watched Succession, you know the central tension of the entire show.
Everyone inside Waystar Royco spends an extraordinary amount of time trying to manage the optics of the company while quietly ignoring the fact that the company itself is… the problem.
There are press strategies.
There are crisis calls.
There are people hired specifically to “shape the narrative.”
But the narrative keeps collapsing, because the underlying reality keeps breaking through.
I think about this show a lot when I talk to nonprofit arts organizations about marketing.
Because the conversation often starts the same way: “Something’s off with our marketing”, "Ticket sales are inconsistent", "Engagement is unpredictable", "Messaging feels scattered".
So naturally, the assumption becomes that the marketing needs to be "fixed".
But after almost fifteen years working inside nonprofit arts organizations, I can tell you something uncomfortable but important:
Marketing is often the department being asked to manage the optics of problems that were created somewhere else.
And that is a very expensive way to run an organization.
The “Narrative Team” Problem
In Succession, the communications team’s job is to take chaos and translate it into something that looks like strategy. Nonprofit marketing teams often find themselves doing the same thing.
They’re expected to turn shifting program decisions, vague mission language, and changing leadership priorities into messaging that feels clear and cohesive to the outside world.
At that point, marketing stops being a strategy and starts becoming a crisis translation.
Marketing does play an important role as a translator inside nonprofit arts organizations.
Programming speaks artistic vision.
Development talks about impact and funding priorities.
Leadership focuses on strategy, and education teams center on community engagement.
Marketing’s role is to turn those different internal conversations into language that audiences understand and care about.
But translation only works when the source language is stable.
When departments are moving in different directions, marketing becomes the person trying to present a group project that no one actually agreed on.
The result is muddy messaging, confused audiences, and a marketing team blamed for “not telling the story clearly,” when the real issue is that the story itself was never aligned.
When Marketing Becomes Reactive Culture
One of the clearest symptoms of misalignment is a reactive marketing culture.
If your marketing team’s weekly rhythm looks like this:
Emergency email requests
Last-minute program announcements
Social media posts are written hours before they go out
Messaging changes halfway through a campaign
That’s an organizational alignment problem showing up through the marketing department. Not a problem of time management. Don’t be fooled.
Reactive marketing culture has real costs.
It not only burns out small teams who are already operating with limited capacity, but it also trains audiences to pay less attention because the messaging lacks consistency.
And that quietly erodes trust inside the organization, because marketing becomes the department everyone expects to “just make it work.”
Over time, the team stops planning and starts triaging, which is exactly what happens inside Waystar Royco when the next crisis hits.
Everyone runs toward the communications team. “Fix the story.”
The Moment of Truth Most Organizations Avoid
There’s a question I sometimes ask leadership teams that makes the room very quiet.
If your marketing team disappeared tomorrow, would the rest of the organization still be aligned about what you’re actually offering your audience?
Not the mission statement. The actual OFFER?
Why does this work matter?
Who is it for? What does that avatar look like?”
Why does this offer exist right now?
How does this offer support the mission statement?
Because if the answer is “probably not,” then marketing has been functioning as organizational glue rather than as a method of communication strategy.
And even Gorilla Glue has limits. At some point, the cracks underneath start showing through the messaging.
Please don’t walk away from this article thinking marketing isn’t important.
It means marketing can only do its best work when the organization around it is clear about:
Why certain programs exist
Who the audience truly is
What role does the organization play in its community
How does mission show up in real decisions
When those things are aligned internally, marketing stops feeling like damage control and starts feeling like amplification. The story becomes easier to tell because the organization is actually living it, and no spin is required.
A Small Reflection Before the Next Marketing Meeting
If you’re sitting in a nonprofit arts organization right now, feeling like the marketing just isn’t landing, I want to offer a different starting question.
“Where inside the organization might the story already be breaking down before it ever reaches the marketing team?”
Because sometimes the most powerful marketing strategy isn’t a new campaign but straightening up its alignment.
And unlike Waystar Royco, nonprofit arts organizations actually have something real to protect.
Mission.
Community.
Artists.
Those things deserve a story that isn’t being patched together at the last minute.
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