You’re running a full communications operation with a small budget and a small team. We see you. Here’s some communication tools that are worth your time.
We’ve included some tried-and-true tools that genuinely earn their place on the list — and a few you probably haven’t heard of yet. All of them were chosen with one kind of team in mind: small, scrappy, mission-driven, and doing more before 10am than most people do all day.
Tool 01: Canva Magic Studio — but make it strategic
Yes, you probably already use Canva. But are you using it to its full potential? Canva’s Magic Studio suite, which includes AI-powered background removal, the Brand Kit, and auto-resize, can cut your design turnaround time dramatically when you set it up right. The move most teams miss: build a locked template library for recurring content like social posts, event flyers, and donor thank-you graphics. When your templates are set up with your brand colors, fonts, and logo baked in, you stop recreating from scratch every single time. Canva for Nonprofits is free for qualifying organizations. If you haven’t applied, do it this week.
The non-mainstream tip: Use Canva’s “Bulk Create” feature to generate multiple versions of a graphic from a spreadsheet. Perfect for personalizing donor thank-yous or creating localized versions of a campaign flyer across multiple zip codes or communities.
Tool 02: A nonprofit event checklist — and we’re giving you ours
Here’s something nobody tells you when you’re a small team running an event: the things that go wrong are almost never the big things. You’ve planned for those. It’s the name badges sitting on someone’s kitchen counter, the ADA check that didn’t happen, the post-event thank-you that went out two weeks late because everyone was exhausted and assumed someone else sent it. Events are where details live — and details are where small teams can miss the mark.
An event planning checklist doesn’t sound glamorous, but it is genuinely one of the highest-leverage tools a small comms team can have. A real, phase-by-phase checklist that covers everything from 6 weeks out through post-event wrap-up, with owners assigned to every task, so everything is covered.
We built one. We use it ourselves — for convenings, community town halls, fundraisers, trainings, and everything in between. And we’re sharing it with you for free, because we believe the organizations doing the most important work shouldn’t have to build everything from scratch.
The WFSA Event Planning Checklist covers every phase: goal-setting and logistics (6+ weeks out), promotion and speaker prep (2 to 4 weeks out), day-of setup, live event management, teardown, and post-event follow-up, including thank-yous, content capture, and CRM updates. It’s built for teams wearing many hats, with owner columns so you can delegate.
Download the free WFSA Event Planning Checklist here
The non-mainstream tip: Once you’ve used the checklist for your first event, do a 15-minute debrief with your team and update it with what you learned. A living checklist that reflects your organization is worth ten generic templates. Build the institutional memory now, so you’re not reinventing the wheel every single time.
Tool 03: Mailchimp + UTM tags — the combo most orgs underuse
Mailchimp is the tried-and-true email platform for a reason: it’s free up to a solid subscriber count, it’s intuitive, and it integrates with almost everything. But most small nonprofits use it like a megaphone and ignore the data it gives back. The real power is in pairing your email campaigns with UTM parameters — short tracking codes you add to links — so you can see exactly what’s driving clicks, sign-ups, and donations. This isn’t just a digital marketing best practice. It’s how you prove your communications work and make the case for your budget at the next board meeting.
The non-mainstream tip: Use Google’s free UTM builder to create tagged links and track them in Google Analytics 4. Set up one simple dashboard in GA4 that shows traffic by source. Then every campaign you run has a story to tell — and you’re the one holding the data. Read more here on how to create UTM tracking links and why you need them.
Tool 04: Storybanking — your most underbuilt communications asset
Data gets people to pay attention. Stories get people to care. A storybank is a living collection of testimonials, quotes, photos, and impact moments that your whole team can draw from when it’s time to write a grant, build a campaign, or post on social media. The problem most nonprofits run into isn’t that their work isn’t powerful — it’s that nobody wrote anything down when it happened. Someone had a transformational conversation at an event. A program participant said something that perfectly captured your mission. Without a system to capture those moments, they are often forgotten.
A storybank fixes that. It doesn’t need to be complicated — a shared folder, a simple intake form, a dedicated Notion page, or even a labeled section in your Trello board (hi, Tool 05) can work. The goal is a single place where stories land and stay, ready to be pulled when you need them.
Tips for building yours:
Create a one-question intake form (Google Forms works fine) and share it with program staff after every event, cohort, or grantee touchpoint. Ask: “Did you hear or see something this week that shows our mission in action?” Make it easy enough that people will fill it out.
When collecting testimonials, ask specific questions instead of “can you share your experience?” Try: “What changed for you?” or “What would you want someone on the fence to know?” Specific prompts produce usable quotes.
Always get written consent before using someone’s story or image in public-facing materials. Work with HR to build a simple photo and story consent form and make it part of every program intake. Consent isn’t just legal protection — it’s respect.
Organize your storybank by theme, not just by date. Tag entries by population served, program area, or content type (quote, photo, video clip, testimonial). You want to be able to search for “economic mobility + grantee quote” in thirty seconds when a deadline is looming.
Revisit and refresh it quarterly. A story from three years ago may still be powerful — but only if someone can find it.
Tool 05: Trello — a project management system you will love to use
Finding the right tool to manage your work across departments can be tough. At WFSA we tried a few different things and landed on Trello. Trello sets our work up in visually pleasing and easy to understand boards that make it easy to track tasks, create checklists, set deadlines, and communicate with each other. With our work living in one place, it’s harder for things to fall through the cracks. We have boards for strategic planning, staff onboarding, and communications campaigns. Things don’t fall through the cracks the way they used to. We have made a solemn collective promise to stop relying on sticky notes. Most of us are holding strong. (Some of us — ahem — are still works in progress.)
The pro tip: Don’t launch a project management tool and expect everyone to build their own boards from scratch. Let your most Trello- or spreadsheet-savvy team members set up the template boards, and let everyone else work from those. Play to your team’s strengths. The person who loves organizing a color-coded Kanban board is not the same person who wants to do it — and that’s okay. Give the former a sandbox and the latter a ready-to-go system, and you’ll get adoption. That’s the whole goal.
The bigger picture
Tools are only as good as the systems around them. The most effective small comms teams we’ve seen aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest software — they’re the ones with clear workflows, documented processes, and the discipline to use a few tools well instead of dabbling in twenty of them.
Start with one tool on this list that solves a pain point you have right now. Build the habit. Then layer in the next one.
At WFSA, we believe the organizations doing the most important work deserve the most support — including the practical kind. If you found this useful, share it with a colleague!
