This week’s Learning Session topic surrounding Marketing was incredibly relevant to my own conversations at City Year. One idea that reverberated throughout the week from Natalie Parcher’s presentation was how storytelling and catering to diverse (in age, but also lived experiences) audiences is crucial to accessing funds and resources for community work. As we saw in the session, it is important for a non-profit organization to centralize their message and what their brand is to increase visibility and communicate better with their respective audiences.

This week at City Year, I was able to observe a Development meeting with the rest of the Managing Development Directors at the national level. Though the conversation was originally intended to focus on an event for donors, it soon shifted to the topic of marketing or branding. Most members on the call emphasized that although City Year is a national organization with 29 sites, there isn’t really a nationally recognized brand or general brand awareness like there is with other organizations such as Teach For America. While there was not a concrete solution or plan to solve the issues surrounding national branding at the meeting, this theme of branding and storytelling seems crucial in consideration of the work that City Year and other nonprofits do.

After I left that meeting with City Year, I had plenty of time to also consider what the role of the Development team is for non-profits like City Year. This also left me with some questions, such as:

• How do you build a consistent story for a national organization while also maintaining the unique stories of individual sites?
• In other words, how can City Year create a solid, recognizable national brand while keeping the emphasis on site-specific stories?

Needless to say, this is a very large conversation to continue long after this Fellowship ends but definitely one that I am interested in observing. Unfortunately, no pictures this week to share with folks, other than my attempt at social media engagement with some Canva art:

We’ll see what next week brings to City Year!