by Reesa DelDuca | Dec 5, 2025 | Articles
Put Down That Shovel.
In almost every discovery call I end up saying the same thing, giving this same sort of reassurance, usually when they’re apologizing for their website or their inconsistent brand or whatever marketing piece they feel guilty about. The thing I say:
You’re the expert in your business. I’m the expert at *this.
(*When I say “this”, dear reader, picture me gesturing towards what’s hidden below the surface—the messy places between your marketing intentions and what lands with your people.)
Their reaction is always the same—this great, heaving exhale like a cartoon kettle letting off steam. As though I just gave them permission to stop carrying something. I think the relief comes from being able to drop the defences and be real with me (and themselves!). And from realizing that someone will take the time to genuinely understand what they do, why it matters, and who needs to hear it, all before trying to communicate any of it.
The guilt around marketing is pervasive in mission-driven work, and it’s worth asking why. You’re struggling because you’re either not a marketing professional, or you are one but you’re also the program director and the grant writer and the person managing a crisis on Tuesday afternoon when the board meeting is Thursday morning. Marketing gets whatever cognitive space remains after you’ve done the work you actually exist to do.
So you end up with half-measures. Templates designed for someone else’s mission—and rarely designed for accessibility. A social media presence that feels like shouting into the void. A website from 2017 that you know is undermining your credibility, but the thought of overhauling it when you can barely keep up with deadlines is paralyzing.
Seymour Chwast said: “If you’re digging a hole in the wrong place, making it deeper doesn’t help.”
I watch organizations dig in the wrong place constantly. They cling to brand identities or websites that no longer reflect who they’ve become because the sunk cost feels too significant to abandon. They wait for some future moment when they’ll have enough capacity to do everything properly, which means they do nothing and watch their relevance erode.
Stay with me on this digging metaphor for a sec. Someone finds you—they’re trying to reach the place where the real work is happening—buuuut they trip over the pile of dirt you’ve been digging up and leave. Your inconsistent design is that pile. They bounce because they can’t figure out what you do or what you want from them, and what is this pile of dirt doing here, anyway? You had their attention at the moment it mattered most, and the mess blocked their path.
You could react to this by doing more—more posting, more templates, more scrambling. I’d like to suggest smaller, more intentional actions. More aligned, less anxiety-making.
Maybe that’s an accessible landing page designed to convert interest into action. Maybe it’s finally letting go of brand assets that no longer serve your positioning. Maybe the scope is smaller than you think.
You already know where the resonance lives in your mission. My work is teasing out how to communicate the message so people can pay attention.
If you’re ready to stop digging in the wrong place, let’s talk about what your next right step actually is.
Your message matters.
by Reesa DelDuca | Nov 18, 2025 | Articles
Have you heard of the term enshittification?
Cory Doctorow coined it to describe the slow degradation of platforms that start user-friendly, then become increasingly exploitative once they’ve made themselves indispensable.
Satisfying to know this has a name, isn’t it??
The cycle goes: first they’re great to attract users, then they squeeze users to attract business customers, then they squeeze business customers to maximize profit for themselves. But we stay in that place of friction because switching costs are too high or there are no real alternatives or how else are you going to reach all those people, but wait you can’t reach them anymore because of the algorithm anyway, and…
Social media feeds have become behavioural modification systems designed to keep you scrolling past the point where you meant to stop. Online communities that began as genuine gathering places now optimize for engagement over connection, turning conversation into content and members into metrics.
Social enterprises do this too, in their way. It starts small—a word here, a phrase there that sounds more “results-oriented” to funders. Maybe you swap out “help” for “impact” or “people” for “stakeholders”—psssst, more on that last term in the p.s.—because that’s what sounds serious in grant applications. You tell yourself it’s just being more strategic, more fundable, more likely to survive another budget cycle. But each adjustment nudges you further from how you actually talk when explaining your work to someone you care about.
This isn’t just digital pollution, though it is that. There’s something deeper happening when the gap between what you project and what you actually are grows too wide. That tension becomes low-grade friction that follows you everywhere.
You start adjusting, with the hope to smooth out the edges. Slapping quick fixes on an outdated site. Cutting corners because the time, money, and people just aren’t there. Pretty soon, the brand you’re projecting looks technically fine—but it doesn’t feel like you anymore. I hear versions of this all the time: “We know our website doesn’t reflect who we are anymore, but no one on staff has the time—or frankly, the skills—to overhaul it. We’re stuck.”
It often sounds like this: “Every time we try to start, we hit a wall. Do we update the copy first? Find a designer? Pick a new platform? It’s too many choices and not enough hours.”
People can sense the performance. The disconnection registers, even when they can’t name it.
I’m obsessed with this—how your landing page reads, whether your website reflects the conversations happening in your office. These aren’t just marketing materials; they’re mirrors where the gap between who you are and who you think you need to be becomes most painfully visible.
The work I do is about closing that gap. Not through slicker marketing, but through the messier process of figuring out who you are, learning about who you help, and letting that show up. Good design reflects your actual priorities, and uses language that matches how you talk when explaining your work to someone you care about.
It’s more meticulous work than slapping a template on your problems, though. But the alternative is adding to the noise and becoming part of the enshittification—another organization that’s been optimized into indistinguishability, professionally polished and fundamentally forgettable.
Want to talk about what this might look like for you? Book some time: [Calendly link]
What I know is this: the cure for enshittification isn’t better polish. It’s the courage to be recognizable. Take this as your nudge to keep resisting in your own way.
P.s. Given the colonial connotations of the term “stakeholder”, its use may have negative connotations for Indigenous Peoples or those seeking to build community equitably. Consider instead: partner, collaborator, supporter, community member, contributor, or interest-holder.
P.p.s. Want to learn more about Cory Doctorow? Try this and this.
High fives, pals.
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