Marketing and Communications Audit
Find out what people read before you write more of it.
Your communications team is not short on output. There is the weekly newsletter, three social accounts, the annual report, the spring postcard, a website with forty pages, and the event invitations that take a full week each. All of it gets made on deadline. Almost none of it gets asked the one question that matters: did anyone read this, and did they do anything afterward?
That question has an answer, and most of it is already sitting in your email platform, your web analytics, and your gift records. The rest comes from asking your readers. An audit puts the evidence on one table, so you can stop guessing and decide, piece by piece, what earns the hours it takes. Sometimes the most useful thing we find is permission to stop.
What We Do
Inventory
We list every channel and every recurring piece: website, email, social media, print, and direct mail. For each one we note who makes it, how often, how long it takes, and who it is for. The hours column alone tends to start conversations.
The numbers
We pull open rates, click-throughs, website traffic, and, where your records allow, what readers did next: registered, renewed, gave. We set aside the figures that look good in a board report and say little, and we focus on the ones tied to action.
Audience check
We read your materials as your donors, members, alumni, and families would, and where it helps, we ask some of them directly. The question is whether you are speaking to the people you most want to reach or talking past them.
Consistency review
We look at whether your organization sounds and looks like itself across every touchpoint, from the homepage to the reply card in the year-end letter.
Roadmap
We turn the findings into a prioritized plan, sorted into what to stop, what to fix, and what to keep doing, with the first steps spelled out so your team can start the following Monday.
What You Walk Away With
- A written audit with findings for each channel, grounded in your own data
- A stop, fix, and keep list for every recurring piece you produce
- A prioritized roadmap with first steps, owners, and a sensible order
- A short set of measures worth tracking from here on, and a clear sense of which ones to ignore
- Staff hours returned to the work that reaches people
What Clients Say
We were spending hours every week on a parent newsletter that the audit revealed almost no one was reading. TRANSCEND Advancement helped us overhaul our communication flow, saving our staff valuable time while actually improving parent engagement across the board.
The marketing audit completely changed how we promote our upcoming seasons. They identified critical gaps in our digital presence and gave us a clear roadmap that directly led to a noticeable increase in memberships.
Let’s talk.
Every hour spent on a piece nobody reads is an hour not spent on a supporter who would have listened. Let’s find out where your hours are going.
Related services. Development Office Audit · Digital Strategy and Campaigns