When Kirk Englehardt joined the Community Foundation of Broward in 2017, the CEO gave him a clear directive.
Every message and story that came out of his marketing and communications team would need to reinforce the foundation’s goal of building its endowment.
That clarity meant making tough choices. Even though the foundation offered scholarship funds, it would not spend resources publicizing them. It would promote donor-advised funds only when those funds were endowed.
"You get more of what you talk about," Englehardt, the foundation's vice president of marketing and communications, told us. "If we spent all of our time talking about scholarships, we were going to get more scholarships."
Endowment shows up in every story, event script, and social post. Andy Reid, who writes much of the foundation's content, reviews drafts through a consistent lens: "Are we talking about the power of endowment?"
The discipline has clearly helped move the needle. During Englehardt’s tenure, assets have grown from just under $200 million to close to $400 million. And 90% of the foundation’s total assets are endowed.
The lesson here isn’t that all foundations and nonprofits should center on promoting endowed giving. It’s that committing to a clear focus often drives outsized results.
Say one thing and say it clearly
The most successful social good organizations often reach or exceed their goals by refining their focus until the message is hard to miss. Then, they keep repeating that message for years.
For instance, while most international development organizations describe overlapping problems in health, education, agriculture, and poverty, the nonprofit charity: water keeps it simple. It only talks about clean water.
In 2025, that approach funded more than 22,000 water projects across 20 countries, bringing clean and safe water to 1.41 million people.
In 2010, Share Our Strength formally launched No Kid Hungry, a campaign whose name states the goal. The organization sharpened its focus on ending childhood hunger in America, largely through school breakfast and summer meals.
Focusing creates difficult choices
When we work with organizations to sharpen their messages or assess their brands, we start by looking at their communications and marketing materials, their websites, and their social media accounts.
Then we compare those materials to their strategic plans, their brand guidelines, and their impact in the regions they serve.
Quite often, their communications reach well beyond their strategies and veer far from what they stand for as a brand.
This often happens for good reasons. Every program has a champion. Every fund has a donor who deserves recognition. Leaving something off the homepage can feel like telling a colleague their work matters less.
Focusing means saying no more than you say yes — and putting your strategy and brand above the bright, shiny objects that cross our desks every week.
That sounds easy in theory. It’s much harder in practice.
How to start
So how do you get there?
Most of the work behind a narrow message belongs to leadership. And it has to happen before the communications team rewrites anything.
Here are four steps to creating a focused message:
Connect your mission to the evidence.
Choose a focus your mission and your data support.
The Community Foundation of Broward chose endowment because it recognized that permanent funding is important to the donors who support its work and that providing long-term funding to local nonprofits is the best way to support the community it serves.
Your organization will likely find a different measure to support your mission. But building that connection is crucial.Build alignment at the top.
The board and CEO each have to back the focus, and getting there usually takes hard conversations. When leaders disagree, the message splits along the same lines.
Our Community Foundation Communications Benchmarking Survey suggests most organizations have ground to cover. Only about 1 in 10 community foundation communicators are highly confident that every board member could share the mission and three proof points — a finding that likely extends across the social-good sector.
Broward treats alignment as ongoing work. As its staff grew from 12 to 26, each new hire had to learn why endowment matters and when to flag a prospect.
Be disciplined about leaving things out.
This is the hardest of the four, because the programs you stop promoting still exist and still need donors. Community foundations feel this most, with broad mandates and long menus of funds.
Narrowing has a price — but it’s often not as large as you might think. Some donors who would have opened a non-endowed fund at Broward may have gone elsewhere. But many others continue to give to and through the foundation even if they’re not interested in setting up permanent funds.
Take the long view.
A focus that changes with every strategic plan or new board chair never has time to sink in. Broward has maintained its commitment to endowment for most of its 42 years. Share Our Strength kept No Kid Hungry at the center for 15 years before widening.
You don’t have to wait
Each organization in this piece gave something up.
Charity: water left the rest of global poverty to other groups.
Share Our Strength put one campaign at the center of an organization that had funded many kinds of anti-hunger work.
In return, each got a message that donors, partners, and new staff could repeat without help. Broward has more than doubled its assets, and 90% of its total assets are endowed.
Here’s how to tell if you’re close to landing on a focused message. Pull your last 10 newsletters and social posts, and write down what each asked a reader to care about.
If the list runs past three or four topics, bring it to your next leadership meeting and ask which item you would keep if you had to choose one.
Then repeat it again and again and again. You get more of what you talk about.
