After a while, as a consultant, you start recognizing a certain kind of vibe every summer from the nonprofits in your oribit. You’re doing your round of monthly client check-ins. Each program is thriving. Every outcome is on track to meet or exceed expectations. All challenges from earlier this year converted into viable opportunities.
Heck, organizations start to seem less like groups of passionate people committed to causes and more like a press releases doing their best to assure everyone that everything is ok. As a consultant, however, you know better.
Look, I’m living and working through the same social, economic, and political realities as leaders, boards, teams, volunteers, donors and funders. Nobody wants bad news, no matter how conditioned we are for it.
Leaders want harmony among managers and staff. Funders reward confidence. Boards expect positive results and healthy budgets. And there’s a real fear that admitting any problems or difficulty will rattle supporters right when you need them most.
The result is often a subtle shift from preparing the organization for the months ahead to preparing the organization’s image for the months ahead. Those two things can look very similar from the outside, but they require very different kinds of work.
But positioning your organization well for the second half of the year has almost nothing to do with performing certainty you don’t feel. It does have everything to do with being genuinely ready to tell an honest, coherent story about who you are and what you’ve learned.
That story does not need to be a story of perfection. In fact, the organizations that are best positioned are usually the ones that understand their own realities clearly enough to explain both what is working and what has required adjustment.
Before you worry about the next appeal, or the next campaign, it's worth asking two simple questions:
Is everyone inside your organization actually telling the same story about where things stand right now? And how true is that story?
Long before any messages about your organization make their way into the world, positioning can make sure that your program staff, your finance team, and whoever handles development or communications are all working from the same understanding of where the organization actually stands.
This sounds super obvious. But it rarely is true in practice. Assuming organizations are actually putting positioning into practice.
The challenge is that internal alignment rarely happens automatically. Different parts of an organization experience the year differently. Program teams see impact, relationships, and community response. Finance teams see constraints, projections, and sustainability questions. Development teams see donor expectations and opportunities.
Positioning begins when those perspectives are brought into the same conversation.
I’ve sat in rooms where the program team describes a year of resilient adaptation while the finance team is quietly alarmed about a widening gap, and neither group has fully absorbed the other’s version of reality.
When that internal misalignment exists, it leaks into external communication in ways donors can sense even when they can’t name it. An appeal letter that radiates confidence while the organization is privately worried reads as slightly hollow, and people who give seriously tend to notice hollow.
There’s a line I really dig that came up, some years ago, during a group training I facilitated. Positioning isn't choosing the loudest moment. It's choosing the moment that best fits your organization.
I truly believe that same principle applies to how you communicate, how you fundraise, and where you invest limited organizational energy. Visibility is not the same thing as relevance, and activity is not always the same thing as progress.
Once there’s internal clarity, positioning becomes about reconnecting with the people who already know you, and doing it without immediately asking them for something. This is a harder discipline than it sounds, because the instinct in a tight year is to move straight to the ask.
But reaching out to longtime supporters purely to share what’s happened, what’s changed, and what you’ve learned, without attaching a request, does something an appeal letter can’t: it signals that the relationship matters independent of the money. That kind of outreach also gives you real information. You learn who’s still engaged, who’s drifted, and who might be ready for a deeper conversation later in the year, all before you’ve spent any of your limited autumn capacity guessing.
Positioning requires you and your team to be honest about which of your organization’s channels are actually working and which have been running on inertia. Because it’s not only about what you say. It is also about whether the systems behind that message can actually support the relationships you are trying to build.
Every organization accumulates communication habits that made sense at some point and now persist mostly out of routine: a newsletter format nobody’s revisited in years, a donation page that hasn’t been tested on a phone since it was built, an appeal template that gets recycled annually with minor edits.
Part of preparing for the second half of the year is unglamorous systems work.
You know what I mean here, possibly. Making sure your donation forms actually function. Confirming that donor gifts can be sent, received, and acknowledged with as much speed and as little friction as possible. Ensuring all messages sent through every opening via the website, social media, and wherever else you and your team are will actually be routed to someone (or something) that responds promptly. And that all messages, contacts, and prospects are monitored and managed.
I’ve seen too many instances every year around summer where warm inquiries from potential donors and funders have gone unaswered. For weeks if not months.
In the thick of all this positioning stuff I’m laying out and sounding out here lies a simple strategic question: Should you and your organization plan for a big end-of-year campaign, centered around one big focus? Or several coordinated actions that feed into a shared goal? or simply stick to what you’re doing with greater or lesser attention to certain elements. Or do nothing at all? There’s actually no universally correct answer here.
A younger organization still building visibility might genuinely benefit from participating in a high-attention giving moment. A more established organization with a strong existing donor base might get more out of quiet, individualized stewardship that a mass campaign can’t replicate.
The point isn’t which choice is right. The point is making the choice deliberately, based on where your organization actually is, rather than defaulting to whatever every other organization in your space is doing.
Positioning well also means testing your story before you’re relying on it. Before the autumn activation begins in earnest, it’s worth asking honestly whether your supporters actually understand what your organization does beyond the specific project or program they last heard about.
Does your language sound like it came from a person who believes what they’re saying, or does it sound institutional, careful, drained of the specificity that makes an organization feel real rather than generic. Read your own materials the way a stranger would, or better, ask someone outside the organization to read them and tell you honestly whether they’d understand your mission from the language alone.
None of this is about performing the act of readiness. It’s about actually building readiness. Slowly, calmly, purposefully, carefully during a time when nobody’s watching closely enough to notice the work happening. When time is afforded to you and when you allow yourself to take advatage of it.
Summer often provides exactly that kind of space: a quieter period to look honestly at what the organization has learned, what needs attention, and what choices will matter most when the pace accelerates again.
Well-positioned organizations ready for autumn aren’t the ones with the most polished messaging. They’re the ones who did the internal alignment, tested their systems, reconnected with the people who already trust them, and made deliberate choices about where to spend their attention. When the busier months do arrive, good orgs are executing a plan they already believe in rather than improvising one that requires buy-in under pressure.
People don’t expect organizations to be perfect. They expect them to be credible, trustworthy, and reliable. Good positioning doesn’t manufacture confidence. It helps earn trust— but good plans, good strategy, and good people are still required to to sustain that trust year round.
On BE4SI, we’re talking nonprofits/NGOs, social enterprise, philanthropy, civil society, and social impact— filtered through U.S. and Central/Eastern European lenses. As a reader-supported publication, we’d be honored to have you as a subscriber.
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