Are you harnessing the power of video?
From watching escapist TV shows (looking at you, Queen’s Gambit), to streaming COVID press conferences, to mindlessly scrolling through social media, video is now a bigger part of our lives than ever before.
Even before staying at home became the new normal, video was a top marketing trend. And a recent Nielsen report showed that adults spend at least 35 minutes per day watching video on phones, tablets, or computers.
You can capture some of these eyes by incorporating video into your upcoming communication campaigns. Here’s how:
Start with strategy.
If you haven’t already, take a step back to center yourself in strategy before starting your video project:
What objective are you trying to achieve? Having a single, clear call to action will make for a powerful video.
Which audience will you need to reach to do so? Knowing who you’re talking to will help you decide on the right style for your video.
Are videos a good way to reach this audience? If not, save this strategy for later!
What does your audience care about and where do they get their information? YouTube? Instagram? The answer to this will help you decide about the best format.
What core messaging will resonate with your audience and motivate them to act? This will help you create a narrative — or as they call it in the biz, storyboard.
Decide on a format.
From a two-hour documentary (!) to a 15-second Facebook clip, video formats vary widely. This is where that strategy comes in handy — build off your foundation to decide on the type of video you’ll create.
For example:
Submissions for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) are down this year in Kentucky, so the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education and GEAR UP Kentucky launched a TikTok challenge to address the issue. Knowing TikTok is popular among their target audience, they’re meeting students where they already are. Check out some of the TikTok videos here.
A strong call to action makes for powerful campaign videos. The nonprofit RAICES created a short 30-second social media video as part of their #KeepThePromise campaign launch. The video, sized for social, uses text, graphics, photos and music to pack a big punch.
Plan it out.
Start a storyboard to outline your video. This is where you’ll bring your messaging and imagery ideas together. There are plenty of free storyboard templates online, but often the easiest way to do it is drawing out your video shots by hand. Simply draw a box (or use Post-its!) for each scene and sketch out the scenes you want to illustrate. Under each box, jot down the script or text that will be shown. This creates a visual map to help guide your production.
Start creating.
Now comes the fun part, when you get to see your project come to life.
SHARE IT.
Time to get that awesome video into the wild! Share your video on the channels you know your audiences frequent. Tap messengers — people who influence your audiences — and ask them to help share as well.
We’d love to see what you create! Send us your videos or tag us with #comms4kids when posting them on social.
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My first job after college was at a PR agency.
I was working with – and I’m not sure how else to phrase this – men’s men. Think: veterans starting their own government contracting businesses, construction CEOs, cybersecurity leaders and more. There was plenty of little lady-ing.
But there were also many, many lessons that I’m still using in my career today, 15 years later. I’m including one of my favorites, and some additional best practices, below.
You know those days where you just want someone to tell you where we're going to dinner?
Sometimes, I get really tired of making decisions – partly because as busy leaders, we make decisions at work all day, every day.
We ask questions such as:
Should we complete this grant application?
Which events should we go to?
Is that conference worth it?
And sometimes, your teammates don’t agree on the answer.
That’s why at Forthright, we use – you guessed it – a data-backed approach to make these decisions.
In our world of child and family advocacy, few communicators have navigated the trenches quite like Marrianne McMullen.
From managing high-stakes crises in the Obama administration to shaping narratives at DC Public Schools – where I had the immense privilege of working for her – Marrianne has spent her career masterfully championing policies that support children and families. Today, she serves as the Director of Communication & Dissemination at Chapin Hall, an independent research and policy center focused on child and family well-being.
To celebrate the two-year anniversary of her book, Persuasive, I sat down with my former boss and mentor to reflect on what it takes to effectively move the needle.
When I say the word hope, I can hear some of you out there sighing through the internet tubes. And honestly, fair enough. In our field right now, hope can sometimes get packaged up like a vague platitude or a promise that misses the point.
But, hear me out. Today, I’m talking about the kind of hope that’s fierce and very, very practical.
Data consistently tells us that messaging has to trigger a sense of hope if you want to make sure your audiences don’t default to defensiveness.
Age gaps exist all across the organization.
From your eager intern to your seasoned board members (and your program staff to your executive director), you're likely communicating across up to 40 years of generational differences.
Here are some tips and tricks to help you stay aligned.
When we launched our research process – the one that led to our new Frenemies + Jargon: Breaking the Habits That Stall Child and Family Advocacy report – I had suspicions about what we’d find.
We heard that as a field, we’re often fake friends.
Let’s break down what we heard and what we can do about it.
Our average coaching client is a communications director. For the sake of this blog, let’s call her Chloe.
Chloe typically works at a public school district, a foundation or a nonprofit.
She landed in her director role coming from the policy, program or development team. She may only have a few years of direct communications experience, but she’s a natural.
Most of the time, she’s a team of one, and she’s carrying everything communications for her organization.
That’s where we step in as a coach.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at what we normally help out with.
So, you need to tell your board of directors or your school board some bad news.
First, blerg. Sorry about that!
Second, we’re here to help.
I've had the opportunity to be involved in some excellent examples of how to do this well – and, unfortunately, I’ve also had to help clean up a few, um… shall we say, less-than-stellar attempts.
Here is a key approach that I’ve seen work well over the years.
We know that right now, the families you serve, the partners you need, the funders you want to attract and the policymakers who need to know your work have completely changed how they use the internet.
The way they use conversational search on platforms like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and Gemini means we simply need to make sure your organization is the trusted AI citation your audiences find.
My cats have me trained.
Yeah, you read that right.
THEY trained ME.
Are we suckers? Oh, absolutely. No question.
Yet, there are some very solid communications lessons to be learned from being a human… trained by… a cat. Here’s what we can all learn.
We’re so used to chasing perfect. Perfection in our work, presenting the perfect image online.
But the thing is, people are tired of perfect. And that needs to impact the way we do our work and the way we advocate. Here’s what’s going on – and what to do about it.
I’m the first to admit it: I’m a nerd for data.
If something is going wrong – I want to know why, so I can fix it.
If something is going well – I want to know why, so I can keep doing it.
That’s why I love a good communications audit. Here’s why you should join me in my nerd-dom and hop on the communications audit train.
An organization (yours, in fact) needs a succinct and centralized set of messages that say what the organization does and how you do it.
When done well, core messages are data-backed ways to describe your work that everyone uses when they talk about your organization.
They typically tell a cohesive story about your organization. You’ll want them to include why you exist (what needs are you fulfilling?), what your mission and vision are, and how you accomplish them.
We’re sharing more about core messaging and how to get it right here.
A couple of weeks ago, I put on my voting shirt (yes, I have one) and headed to vote in Virginia’s special election.
Leading up to the vote, I got So. Many. Campaign. Messages.
The problem? Most of them were unconvincing. It made me think about just how important special elections and bond campaigns are.
That’s why today, I’m sharing best practices about what’s working right now for special elections and bond campaigns.
A couple of weeks ago, Zoe and I presented at the Pennsylvania Family Leadership conference. They invited us to speak about the power of storytelling. We walked through how storytelling can make a difference, best practices for setting up (or expanding!) a storytelling program and how to create smart storytelling practices.
We focused on how to ensure family leaders have what they need to succeed in storytelling. One family leader mentioned that while she has shared her story dozens of times, only one nonprofit ever truly prepared her.
That’s why I’m sharing some of our tips below!
Your team is working really hard. You know what? I’ll say it. Too hard. They’re surrounded by uncertainty, harm and crises. You’re facing staffing changes. (And we’re seeing an unprecedented spike in leadership turnover, too.) The landscape you’re working in is constantly evolving. It’s so easy for your team morale to take a hit when just one of these things occur.
But when all of them are happening all at once? It’s time to focus on improving your team morale.
You want your team to feel energized and hopeful, knowing their vital role contributes to the bigger picture.
How? Well, here are a few morale-boosters workshops we have hosted for various teams (including our own):
Today, it isn’t good enough to just throw your information up on the web and make sure it has the keywords you know your audience searches for.
Instead, you need to intentionally lay out information so that it appears in AI search summaries (like Google's AI overviews) and comes up in the right AI search answers. Recent research from UPCEA shows generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews shape how people gather information, verify details and form opinions.
You pour massive energy into creating beautiful, data-rich resources for your campaigns. It’s heartbreaking when those tools do not reach the families and policymakers who need them most.
So… let’s fix that, shall we?
Thinking about speaking at a conference? It’s one of the best ways to build your organization’s brand and share your expertise.
But getting your session idea accepted can feel like a total mystery.
That’s what we’re here for.
This is your simple, four-step guide to help you find the right conference and write a proposal that gets a big, enthusiastic YES.
As part of our client partnerships, we conduct research. This looks like stakeholder interviews, surveys, full communications audits… you name it, we’ve likely done it.
Every now and again, we see a trend emerging. And this is one of those times. Over the past couple of years, we’ve heard more and more about the power of personal relationships.
Here’s what we’ve learned – and what to do about it.
We all want to do our best work. But our brains have a literal limit on how much fuel they have for deep thinking. When we’re always on, constantly distracted or simply switching tasks, we slow ourselves down and drain our energy... fast. For example, research from the University of Chicago found that just having a smartphone nearby reduces our “available cognitive capacity.”
That’s precious brain space we’re wasting. As child and family advocates, we don’t have that kind of energy to spare right now.
Let’s protect our headspace instead.
Here’s how.
News breaks.
Funding is cancelled.
New legislation is enacted.
How do communicators like you find steady ground while everything feels like an earthquake?
We get it. It’s a lot.
Yet charting a stable course on unsteady ground is something we’re pretty darn good at here at Forthright. (In fact, we have data to prove it. We heard from our clients in our 2025 client happiness survey that we’re a shelter in the storm.)
So how do we do it? Let’s break it down.
You have a meeting with your board in an hour. You’re presenting at a conference in a month. Your executive director has a local news interview tomorrow.
And you’re staring at a blank page, trying to figure out how to condense years of work into a three-minute segment.
Talking points help you bridge that big-picture vision (the deep work! the passion!) with the specific moment you’re in, the audience you’re talking to and your goals.
Here’s how we do it.
Too often, we overlook the people who already know us, love us, and can help us accomplish our goals.
It takes an intentional plan to mobilize these champions. As always, we’ve got you.
We’ve included your step-by-step guide for activating your champions at every phase of your campaign below!
Your team is (understandably) dragging.
You can feel them losing sight of your “why” amidst the chaos and changing priorities.
Team meetings are downbeat and everything feels… hard.
You’re not alone. We’re hearing it from organizations just like yours across the country.
That’s why we designed a special menu of 2026 trainings that naturally foster team connection and positivity.
The ultimate success metric is that your team walks away feeling energized, hopeful, and clear on their priorities and vital role in the organization’s future.
Here are a few options for a morale-boosting team training. (Psst – don’t worry, if these don’t feel quite right for your particular team, we can design a custom training just for you.)
You know those conversations you find yourself having over and over again?
Here’s a key question that’s spinning on repeat (across various clients) here at Forthright:
“Where should we focus our efforts to influence child-and-family focused policies? Should we concentrate on the federal, state or local level?”
It’s a great question, especially in the Year of Our Lord 2026.
Let’s dive in.