The social sector has inherent communications challenges we must proactively address.
Francesca Ernst Khan is chief brand and digital marketing officer at The Clinton Foundation.
When DOGE took an axe to USAID and federally-funded programs across the country, the philanthropic community found itself at a crossroads. Many nonprofits cut services or shuttered entirely. Major institutions took a “wait-and-see” approach to monitor how the situation would unfold, inadvertently freezing funds while communities absorbed the damage.
Over a year later, national outrage has largely faded and news cycles have moved on even though we’re now beginning to see the fuller consequences of the cuts. But that didn’t happen because people stopped caring. It happened because the social sector has inherent communications challenges we must proactively address.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 12.8 million Americans work in nonprofits and philanthropies, and their work touches nearly every person in this country. But when the sector came under the most coordinated attack in modern history, it couldn’t sustain a public argument in its own defense. At the same time, AI is accelerating the speed and scale of misinformation (lowering the cost of these attacks), and raising the bar for what credible, trusted communication looks like. Organizations that don’t adapt quickly will find themselves outpaced not just by political opponents, but by the information environment itself.
That gap — between the importance of the work and the public’s understanding of it — should be a wake-up call. The costs of not answering it are enormous.
Ten years ago I joined the Clinton Foundation which has long been combatting many of these challenges: coordinated misinformation, deep politicization and the particular pressures of communicating mission-driven work at the highest levels.
Here’s what I’ve learned along the way.
- Identify the real problem before you chase shiny tactics or distractions.
Everyone has opinions about what your organization should be doing to get attention. The job of communications leadership is to actively listen, diagnose the actual problem and figure out how communications is part of the solution.
For example, the Clinton Foundation is one of the rare organizations that has widespread awareness – many people are familiar with the Clinton Global Initiative, which has launched thousands of projects that have reached more than 500 million people worldwide, or the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which changed how the world delivers HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria medications to the Global South.
But years of coordinated misinformation have primed a meaningful slice of our potential audience to doubt us before we say a word — meaning one of our core communications challenges centers around building trust. That diagnosis clarified everything: our winnable audiences, our brand positioning and our programmatic focus on community-building and impact. It also helped shape our defenses — third-party validation from charity watchdogs, proactive fact-checking infrastructure, and long-term relationship-building with media and partners.
The broader sector faces a different version of the same challenge. At a moment when institutional trust is at historic lows, 57% of Americans report high trust in nonprofit organizations, rating them above government and for-profit businesses. This is an asset, but we can’t leverage an asset around a problem if we haven’t collectively established what it is.
- Think in moments, not channels.
In political campaigns, the central organizing units are the candidates, the message and the moments (rallies, campaign stops, speeches) used to directly engage people. This type of mentality is part of our DNA at the Foundation, and puts storytelling at the center of our content strategy.
In 1992, the campaign promise that elected President Clinton into office was “Putting People First.” It wasn’t just a splashy tagline, it was a calling that carries through to our mission today. When we organize by moments, we can treat every one of President Bill Clinton’s, Secretary Hillary Clinton’s, and Chelsea Clinton’s appearances as an opportunity to build a direct connection with our audience, to peek behind the curtain of what interests them, drive understanding of the importance of the work. Whether we’re visiting our programs that have installed libraries into laundromats, or meeting the team that trains communities on how to administer NARCAN to save lives, or simply FaceTiming with a grassroots supporter between meetings at the office, we want you to join us and help rebuild a culture of service and giving back to others.
Organizations and people breaking through have added this type of moment-centric approach are capturing attention by choosing real stories, bucking the trends of AI-slop, and helping to re-enforce key narratives over time.
- Integrate marketing and comms to compete like a consumer brand.
Your audience doesn’t experience your organization by channel anymore — they move seamlessly across devices and platforms, and every touchpoint matters. Whether you’re a global foundation, a local food bank, or a major consumer brand, you’re competing for attention alongside every other message in their feed.
That reality makes cross-functional coordination nonnegotiable. Building a direct relationship by centering your audience’s needs is essential to trust (and to bolstering your defenses as traditional gatekeepers continue to shift). We use a simple device in content reviews: a literal, physical seat at the table for our audience. Before anything ships, we ask whether this serves them, not whether it satisfies internal stakeholders. Leaders in global development tend toward nuanced messaging that makes perfect sense in policy discussions and often gets lost on a general audience. The seat at the table bridges that gap.
Data and AI make this possible at scale. It has helped us surface which audiences are engaging and where we’re losing people before it’s too late. That turns coordination from an operational discipline into a strategic one. For example, at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, every team represents different target audiences but builds from the same brief and works toward the same goals. We know that every message, every moment, and every mechanism for delivery should add up to something greater than the sum of its parts. Without strategic coordination, you’re producing content. With it, you’re building a brand that benefits society.
- Make influencing everybody’s job.
The Foundation’s political DNA means that we’ve always relied on our community of surrogates and partners to help us get the word out about our work in credible ways. But in 2024, we formally layered modern influencer marketing into our broader digital transformation efforts.
Partnership has always been central to how we think about our work, and influencer marketing was a fresh extension of that ethos. When we released the grip of our brand and started adapting to the formats that drive online conversation today – the effect was immediate. We began attracting larger audiences and driving significantly higher engagement, we signaled that we were open to innovation and new ideas that brought us into more conversations, and we won recognition for digital excellence from the Shorty Awards.
Lifting up and training our teams as subject-matter experts, and partnering with independent influencers showed us new pathways for creating genuine trust and understanding in ways that are achievable with a lean team. We’ve prioritized investments in our in-house studio – producing serialized content with staff and partners, integrating ‘read-outs’ and notes from the field into our text-based channels, lifting up LinkedIn reflections about how the work gets done, placing timely op-eds on issues important to our mission, and have invited influencers and media as central partners and participants to our convenings.
Working in this way enables us to stay nimble while actively competing for the audiences that we believe belong in our community. Shoring up public awareness, trust and support will depend on embracing these formats and approaches moving forward.
- Create clear systems and stop worrying about perfect creative. AI can help.
One of the most persistent problems in complex organizations is speed. We’d get a window to enter a cultural conversation and watch it close while we were on version 28 of a single asset, wondering if “brat summer” was still a thing.
The fix wasn’t better project management software. It was clearer ownership combined with smarter tools. We defined roles more precisely, removed the handoffs that created bottlenecks and shifted toward a test-and-learn culture. AI has been central to that shift — helping us move faster on content production, surface audience insights we’d otherwise miss, and free up our team’s creative energy for the work that actually requires human judgment. It doesn’t replace strategy or voice, but it removes the friction that used to slow both down.
That cultural shift matters as much as the technology. When everyone knows what they’re responsible for and trusts the strategy underneath them, AI becomes a force multiplier rather than a distraction
Leadership has to trust the strategy too, which means not knee-jerking at every underperforming post, not relitigating the brief every time the data disappoints and, as President Clinton often calls on us to do, to “follow the trendlines, not the headlines.”
Every organization and the sector as a whole has a real window here. Americans believe in mission-driven work and trust in nonprofits remains high. The work is urgent and visible – and still very susceptible to attack or demise. Organizations that focus on building an integrated communications discipline at the center of their mission will help bring civility and active citizenship back into the cultural mainstream, and will be poised to bring the public with them when it matters most.
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