Summary:
Built a 2026-27 marketing and communications strategic playbook for SOAR365, a Richmond nonprofit serving individuals with disabilities, mapping audience journeys, content systems, and campaign ideas to close the gap between mission and visibility.
- The Ask: Develop a strategic playbook that gives SOAR365’s communications team a clear system for storytelling, audience targeting, and content prioritization, something the org could actually run on day to day, not just a one-off campaign idea.
- The Challenge/Problem: SOAR365 supports thousands of individuals and families across a lifetime of services, but its marketing lacked a unifying structure. Different audiences (clients, donors, volunteers, employees, employers) were being reached inconsistently, and funding wasn’t keeping pace with the cost of delivering high-quality care.
- The Solution: Built a full audience journey framework across five core audiences, paired with signature campaign concepts, a tiered content prioritization system, and a 12-month rollout plan so the strategy could move from slide deck to daily execution.
My Role(s):
- Strategy Development
- Audience Research & Journey Mapping
- Deck & Design
Background:
SOAR365 is a Richmond-based nonprofit that creates life-fulfilling opportunities through a lifetime of support, experiences, and community for individuals with disabilities. This work was completed as part of my internship with SOAR365, where I supported the communications team in building out strategic and creative deliverables.
Process:
Started by identifying the core problem facing families navigating disability support: confusion, gaps, and limited access. From there, I worked to reframe SOAR365’s communications approach around a simple idea, that support should function as a connected pathway rather than a set of fragmented services.
Key Insights & Research:
- SOAR365 already moves people through a clear pathway, from early intervention through therapy, PARK365 and camp experiences, adult day support, employment, and lifelong community belonging. The challenge wasn’t the work, it was that the story wasn’t being told as one connected system.
- The numbers back up the mission, with 2,087 individuals served, 1,244 volunteers activated, and 250+ employment outcomes in the most recent year alone.
- Funding doesn’t fully cover the cost of high-quality services, which makes closing the awareness and engagement gap a mission-critical priority, not just a marketing nice-to-have.
- SOAR365 isn’t speaking to one audience, it’s speaking to five: Clients + Families, Donors, Volunteers, Employees, and the dual-sided Disability Employment audience of job seekers and employers. Each one needed its own journey, not a one-size-fits-all message.
Strategy:
Every audience moves through the same six-stage journey, Awareness, Evaluate, Research, Act, Experience, and Share, but what they need to see and hear at each stage is different. I mapped each audience’s path individually, from a first-time donor’s “why it matters” moment to a job seeker’s road toward long-term employment, so content could be built with intention instead of guesswork.
Executions/Work:
To bring the strategy to life, I developed five signature campaign concepts designed to work across the full audience system:
Where It Starts: Follows one individual’s full journey with SOAR365, from first day to current day, showing how every moment builds toward something bigger.
A Life, Fully Supported: Shows the full lifespan of support in one narrative, proving that SOAR365 evolves alongside the people it serves.
What If We Weren’t Here?: Makes the cost of absence real, for families, individuals, and the Richmond community.
Built for More: Leads with ability instead of limitation, reframing disability content around real accomplishment rather than the usual narrative of what’s missing.
365 Days of Opportunity: An always-on content engine proving disability support isn’t a once-a-year mission.
I also built a content prioritization framework and a weekly, monthly, and quarterly publishing rhythm so the comms team could execute consistently without guessing what to post next.
Finally, I laid out a 12-month rollout plan broken into three phases, Foundation, Activation, and Optimization, so the strategy had a real runway instead of living only on paper.
Application:
This audience journey framework isn’t unique to nonprofit or disability services work, it’s a model that applies anywhere an organization is trying to move multiple distinct audiences toward action, whether that’s donors, customers, employees, or partners. The core idea, mapping what each audience needs at every stage and building content systems instead of one-off campaigns, scales across sectors. For SOAR365 specifically, the goal was to turn the playbook into something that lives day to day, not just a strategy deck that sits on a shelf.
