What led you to write it, Ali? What do you observe about how nonprofit communication staff are often treated, viewed, or valued at nonprofits?

Yeah.

So I, and you too, Farrah, we work with countless nonprofits, and we often are in conversation or doing work tied to, like, the structure of communications teams and more of the internal workings of communications teams, like their infrastructure, processes, workflows.

And what I've heard over the years, time and time again, is that communications teams or team members are brought in really late to projects, and they're almost treated often like an in-house, like, Kinko shop.

So after big decisions are made, after there's, like, a big program strategy that's already established or a big research project, kind of like timelines are set, the work is done, and then, "Hey, can communications come in and, like, help get out the news about this?" Really kind of at the end of the process.

Um, kind of treated, you know, as the, the final megaphone rather than a strategic partner.

So after hearing this many, many times from a lot of different organizations, small and big, I was kind of just wanting to dig in and think more about why might this be and if there's, like, an opportunity for the sector to approach communications in a little different way.

What changes when communicators are involved from the start? How, how can we make the case? What actually gets better when we have the comms team here from day one and not day one hundred?