Much of nonprofit marketing happens on a screen. But every physical space your audience enters – from a clinic or waiting room to an office, program space, vehicle, or donor wall – is communicating too, whether you’ve designed it to or not. A blank wall is still a design decision. An institutional waiting room still creates an experience. A generic donor wall still says something about how you recognize support. For small marketing teams, physical spaces are an often-overlooked part of the brand experience. They’re where donors see the mission up close, where program participants decide whether they feel welcome, and where the moments that fuel your social content can happen. In this practical, visually driven session, James Jensen will show how nonprofits can make their physical spaces work harder for donor engagement, storytelling, and community visibility – without a renovation-sized budget. Using before-and-after case studies from The Alex, a Calgary community health centre, and Momentum, a nonprofit focused on reducing poverty and building sustainable livelihoods, alongside other examples, James will introduce the SPACE framework for looking at a space through your audience’s eyes. Attendees will learn to spot what their environment is communicating by accident, identify practical opportunities for change, and make their spaces more intentional, welcoming, participatory, and memorable.
James Jensen has spent nearly 30 years helping nonprofits and social-impact organizations communicate more clearly through brand, website, print, and spatial design. As founder and creative director of Atom Studio, he has led projects for organizations including CAMH, the LEGO Foundation, the Canadian Women’s Foundation, and Centre for Suicide Prevention. James also created No Small Change, the only grant of its kind in Canada, giving emerging nonprofits access to professional brand strategy and design at no cost. His own office is something of an ongoing design project too – the wall behind him on video calls is covered in a collage of pages from old encyclopedias he collects.