Core Competencies: Defining Our Mission & Approach
10 years ago, I decided to launch my own business. I knew why I needed to do it: to heal from years of workplace stressors and control my daily schedule. I knew who I would work with and on behalf of: people and organizations that wanted to operate in partnership rather than transactionally. I knew that I had a unique and needed approach to nonprofit marketing, outside the confines of the status quo mind frame that fails to reflect those who do not fit nicely into the mainstream mold. I knew I had mastered the technical skills and had years of experience and expertise from which to draw. I deserved to sit in a seat of influence and to lead projects for high-profile organizations that were working for our collective greater good.
The first things I had to check off my to-do list included:
Getting my business license
Securing the website address
Developing a logo and brand colors
Printing business cards
Once I got through this initial list, I began developing the brand story, which included defining my mission and service offerings. By accepting and working within my natural gifts and skills and letting go of the thinking that I had to do or see things in a specific or prescribed way, I developed a secret sauce that distinguishes PJS Consultants from other firms to this day.
Pro Tip: An organization's brand story is a brief narrative that describes the when, why, and how your organization came to be and for whom it serves. It’s an introduction, an opening conversation to your target audience.
To me, there was something missing in the way that most education nonprofits and community-based organizations approached communications. Stories of pain and suffering, images of lack and loss—this is what the vast majority of communications professionals were suggesting clients lead with and lean into. This approach perpetuates negative stereotypes while neglecting the wholeness of people’s experiences and the truth of systemic oppression. Instead of inspiring joy and hope, this approach appeals to feelings of fear and serves to create distance between people rather than bring them closer together. I offer that we can operate from a space of love, elevate the beauty and promise of humanity, and get even better results. In doing this, we can also lift the spirits of those we serve by dignifying their experiences rather than denigrating them. I came to know these two distinct approaches as asset framing and deficit framing. After studying the topics extensively, I quickly realized that I naturally approach my work in an asset-framing way and that I’ve leaned into this approach in my storytelling.
I believe that marketing communications practitioners who approach the work through deficit framing do so because they’re familiar with it and it has been successful—it’s the default way. The approach that we were all trained in is heavily grounded in false narrative, misperception, and persistence of unfounded stereotypes. This approach allows and even encourages the storyteller to name and see themselves as different and separate from the people they’re writing about and serving. As a result, the words and images they select to tell the story often have a tone of lack and loss—a tone they’d be less likely to evoke if they were writing about themselves or people they perceived as connected to them. As a Black woman, I am constantly battling the negative stereotypes that are reinforced by marketing. I knew that, by rooting my firm in truth telling versus perpetuation of stereotypes, I could work to restore humanity in marketing. I could choose to approach my work in ways that result in honest, hopeful, and inspiring storytelling.
Soon into my self-employment journey, with this positive narrative approach to communications in mind, I began to meet leader after leader who valued my skills, my service offering, and the perspective I used to apply both. Some of my first clients included the East Bay Community Foundation and Oakland Unified School District’s Office of African American Male Achievement. For these clients, respectively, I was asked to facilitate a Communications 101 training for a group of 25 grassroots nonprofit grantees and to design and implement a communications strategy for the district’s new initiative. My fees were based on the number of hours spent; the exposure that the project would bring to my consulting practice and me; and how much I would learn. Because I enjoy working with new initiatives and small emerging nonprofit organizations and I understood that their budgets are often limited, my fees were modest. At the time, I did not have the obligation of office rent; employee salaries and benefits; multiple insurances, etc. I did my best and worked hard to exceed expectations. My positive reputation began to grow, and today, 10 years later, most of our business comes from client referrals.
Now, looking back, I realize that for the first five years of having my own business, all of my clients were Black-led organizations serving Black communities. The stories about their work and impact needed and deserved to be told through the lens of joy and dignity. Being in partnership with these leaders and their teams allowed me to work with precision and to hone my expertise in positive narrative marketing. I was given the breathing room and creative space to design narrative and implement strategy without the heaviness of office politics and macro and microaggressions that play out day after day in a typical office setting. For so many years, I had been stifled; for so many years, I held back; for so many years, I didn’t realize my own brilliance. But finally, the blinders were off, and I felt affirmed.
Practitioners that my team and I coach often ask us, “Well, what word should I replace this harmful, deficit-based word with?” Rather than suggest a simple swapping of words, we encourage our clients to explore the thinking that led them to select the problematic language in the first place. Determining that reason is where PJS Consultants starts. Our work isn’t to change the word on the page; it is to advance the field and to guide storytellers to examine their own beliefs and biases. This is what shapes the stories that we tell.
This year, in honor of our 10-year anniversary, we launched the PJS Consultants Restoring Humanity in Marketing Fellowship™. Our two objectives are to support career changers and recent graduates in learning about communications consulting and to build a pipeline of talent that approaches social and public sector marketing with an asset frame from the start. We aim to flood the market with communications and marketing professionals whose storytelling begins and ends with the joy and hope of humanity. This is our contribution to the field; PJS Consultants is seeding transformative and lasting change for the betterment of our sector and society at large.
-Precious J. Stroud