damselfly digital

"Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” Steve Jobs I have worked in marketing for nearly 20 years and I STILL feel like I haven't mastered it. There are days where it feels like my head is spinning with ideas and decisions and options. This is an incredibly complicated and complex, even for someone who has been doing it for a while.

"Communications is not a role. It's a system. " Autumn Celeste All too often, businesses jump straight into posting on social media, redesigning their website, or trying the latest marketing trend without understanding why their efforts aren't producing lasting results. In nature, growth doesn't happen all at once. A thriving forest depends on healthy soil, changing seasons, flowing water, and balanced ecosystems. The same is true in business. Drawing inspiration from the Fiv

“You can’t be everything to everyone. If you decide to go north, you cannot also go south.” Jeroen Boschma As kids we were often told that being different was risky. Fitting in and blending in was social capital. That may be true in middle school, but it's far from true in business. The competitive edge lies in the differentiators: What do you bring to the table that no one else does? What unique approaches or frameworks set you above the competition? How do you create better

“The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Cherish your own voice. Don’t try to sound like anybody else.” Anne Rice As artificial intelligence floods the internet with faster, cheaper content, something unfortunate is happening: Everyone is beginning to sound the same. Every day, millions of blog posts, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, and emails are generated with the same handful of prompts that results in content that is grammatically correct, polished, safe,

"As a writer, you have something AI doesn't: An indelible brain. Write the sentence only you would write, and make the connections only you can. The internet has plenty of "competent" writing already. It has very little that sounds like a person. Be a person." Megan DeMatteo Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how we create content. In seconds, it can draft blog posts, write social media captions, summarize research, brainstorm headlines, and even generate enti

"Nearly every problem in nonprofits comes back to Communications. Can't fill your event? Donors aren't renewing? Staff feels out of the loop? Board doesn't understand the mission? Legislators won't move on your bill? It all goes back to Communications." Nick Friend After spending years in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, I've come to an unpopular conclusion: nonprofit communications is often harder than traditional marketing. The problem I've observed and experience

"The role of the designer is that of a good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests." Charles Eames These days, between AI and other accessible tech tools, nearly anyone can create a logo, build a website, or generate a social media graphic in a matter of minutes. But just because something is easy to create doesn't mean it is effective. Good design is more than making something look attractive. It is a form of communication that helps people understand who you

The problem with spending 15-20 years in marketing and communications from agencies to in-house, nonprofit to small business, is that I became the epitome of the generalist—someone who can think strategically and execute across channels. When I first started freelancing, so many people recommended me to “just pick one thing”. Cue the resistance. The grief. The quiet panic of feeling like I've being asked to abandon a career you worked hard to build. Did you know that Nobel Pr

From my experience, color choice is one of the hardest parts of visual design, especially for those who are not quite sure what they want their brand to stand for. Most people choose brand colors the way they choose mood lighting—intuitively, aesthetically, and often in isolation. A nice beige here, a dreamy green there, a bold accent color for “personality.” It looks good… until it has to function on screens and out in the digital world. In this post I'll explain why your br

The harsh reality of running a service-based business: you can be excellent at what you do and still be terrible at consistently finding people who want to pay you for it. For many freelancers, consultants, coaches, creatives, and service-based business owners, client acquisition feels like an endless treadmill. You finish one project and immediately panic and wonder where the next one is coming from. So you send pitches, answer job postings, post on social media, follow up w

"When you build for accumulation, your impact dies when you do. When you build for circulation, your impact compounds indefinitely. Wealth is not what you manage to hoard. True wealth is the value that keeps flowing because of you." Kasper Bjørkskov For the longest time, I couldn’t find the words to describe the heart of my business—who I served, why I did this work, and what it all truly meant. Purpose-led. Mission-driven. Soul-aligned. Earth-aligned. Nature-based. Holistic.

“What’s the point if you make something that’s not you?” Gloria Estefan We’ve all experienced it by now—that subtle cringe when reading something that says all the “right” things… and yet somehow says nothing at all. It’s clean. It's polished. It’s structured. It’s optimized. And it’s completely flat and formulaic, and thus- relatively forgettable. As AI-generated content is becoming more and more common, consumers are practicing the human art of discernment and responding (

Scroll long enough on any platform and you’ll observe a quiet rebellion of people embracing the "chronically offline" movement. Many business owners, nonprofits AND consumers are all daydreaming of a life without social media. They’re tired. Burned out. Discouraged. They miss the olden days of real conversations, landlines, answering machines, and the secret spots you only hear about if someone tells you. This isn’t laziness or a lack of ambition. It's a collective signal tha

“We envision a global economy that uses business as a force for good. All business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.Through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.” B-Corp Declaration of Interdependence Entrepreneurship is often framed as a pursuit of growth: more clients, more revenue, more followers, more visibility, more everything. But what if MORE wasn't the best goal to have? Ethical entreprene

"The job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition.” Michael E. Porter In entrepreneurship, we’re often taught to think about business as one giant competition. Who has the biggest audience? Who ranks higher? Who charges more? Who is getting more press, followers, clients, or attention? But the goal isn’t to constantly draw comparisons in order to"beat" your competitors. It's simply to understand the landscape well enough to find your own place within it. F

“Speed changes everything. Scaling amplifies every flaw.” Julie Supan Something many small business owners have learned the hard way: Marketing is a pressure test. It not only exposes weaknesses in your business, but it magnifies them on a larger scale. When you start actively promoting your company, whether its running ads, launching campaigns, sending emails, posting consistently, you’re turning up the heat and sealing the lid. And just like a real pressure cooker this reve

There are few business acronyms capable of triggering simultaneous anxiety, exhaustion, and skepticism quite like three little letters: RFP. Short for 'Request for Proposal', an RFP is a formal document organizations use to solicit bids from vendors, consultants, agencies, contractors, or service providers for a specific project or initiative. In theory, RFPs exist to create fairness, transparency, and structure. In practice, they often become bloated procurement exercises th

"One of the strangest things about communications is that the better you are at your job, the less visible your contribution becomes. People experience clarity and assume it was always there, when it wasn't. A lot of our work is invisible. People see the campaign, the website, the report or the event. They don't see the months spent helping people get clear enough to create it." Wendy van Eyck Throughout my 20 year career in marketing, I have thought about leaving many times.

'Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order." Anne Wilson Schaef Perfectionism wears a very convincing costume. It shows up as dedication, discipline, and excellence. It earns praise and quiet admiration. It feels like a badge of honor that you have "high standards", that you care and that you tried. But more often than not, perfectionism is actually keeping you stuck, rather than pushing you towards success. It keeps you trapped in a cycle of endless hiding, tweaking,

“Hustle culture thrives on urgency, not importance.” Brené Brown Hustle culture teaches us that constant productivity equals worth. That rest is something you earn. That slowing down means falling behind. But your nervous system doesn’t understand any of that. It only understands speed and sensation, safe or unsafe. When our needs are ignored, the body doesn’t reward you with success like capitalism does. It responds with fight, flight, or shutdown. This doesn't mean you’re