Anchor House Marketing & Communications Plan

January 2023 – June 2023

Objective

Work in partnership with Anchor House to develop a marketing and communications plan to achieve strategic plan goals to engage existing and new supporters, increase funding, and elevate programs. The organization also sought guidance to improve internal and external communications and marketing efforts, recommendations on processes to build internal capacity and sustainability, and clearly articulate the organizational identities and storytelling opportunities for Anchor House, Inc. and the Anchor House Foundation regarding fundraising, programming, staff recruitment, and advocacy. 

Results

Developed the organization’s first-ever comprehensive branding guide, recreated high-resolution logo artwork suite, created customized audience personas, updated elevator pitch, people-first language and terminology style guidelines, and key language used by youth, young adults, and families in need of Anchor House services to help increase targeted communications 

Enhanced email newsletter template and provided staff training to facilitate sustainable updates

Developed a marketing and communications plan that: 

Includes goals and historic benchmark data, identifies KPIs to track moving forward, and identifies resources to help manage these goals

Includes guidance on how cross-department collaboration can help reach other organizational goals

Provides recommendations to improve internal systems and support sustainable communications procedures, including a list of step-by-step guidance and recommendations for improvements to website, email, social media, building the story bank, building relationships with press, guidance on how to manage crisis communications, a list of recommended communications tasks needed for future budgeting purposes, and goals for the communications strategy overall

Includes an annual communications calendar that incorporates a wide range of DEIJ events with detailed month-by-month guidance on topics to discuss, tactics to utilize, as well as ways to add in and communicate around new events and opportunities as they arise

To support this important communications work, our team also updated the content management software of the Anchor House website to enhance performance, maximize SEO functionality, provide a working blog, and facilitate sustainable updates and maintenance by internal staff.