A regional nonprofit doing real work on Lake Erie, in a space crowded with organizations that mostly talk about it.
The problem
What was actually wrong.
A lot of organizations say they care about Lake Erie. The Lake Erie Foundation is one of the few actually testing solutions in the field, funding research, and pushing policy. You could not tell that from the outside.
The communications read like a collection of lake news. Algal bloom forecasts, funding updates, event reminders. All accurate, none of it adding up to an answer to the only question a donor or sponsor asks: why this organization?
- No in-house marketing team. A small staff, a board, and a long list of things that needed to go out.
- The best story was not being told. LEF and Flint Run Engineering were installing phosphorus filters on high-runoff farm fields in the Maumee watershed. Early results were strong. Almost nobody outside the project knew about it.
- One event, one night. Celebrate the Lake is the biggest fundraising moment of the year. It was treated as an evening, not a platform.
- Impact was undocumented. Plenty of activity, no consistent record of what it produced.
- Every channel started from scratch. Newsletter, email, social, print and web were each fed separately. Nothing was reused.
Our strategy
The call we made, and why.
We positioned LEF as the practical-solutions organization for Lake Erie. Not the loudest voice, not the broadest. The one that turns research into something you can point to.
That decision changed what we produced. Fewer topics, told better. The P-Filter project became the flagship story. Celebrate the Lake became a year-round relationship program. Advocacy stayed factual and specific. Every piece connects back to five pillars: understand the lake, put solutions to work, advocate for better decisions, bring people together, help people protect the lake.
That is Marketing Miles Per Gallon applied to an organization with no marketing department at all.
What we did
Managed marketing
Acted as LEF’s embedded marketing department. Planning, production, reporting, and the day-to-day requests that come with a working nonprofit. Quarterly performance reporting across web, email and social so leadership sees what the work is doing.
Social media
Photo-first content for Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram at a steady three-post weekly cadence. A deliberate mix of problems, progress, people and partners, because constant crisis messaging burns an audience out.
Content
The Breaking Waves email newsletter. Three print newsletter editions, including a full eight-page winter issue written and designed end to end. Long-form website articles on harmful algal blooms, H2Ohio, data-center water use and the P-Filter project. Direction and production of the P-Filter explainer video.
SEO and inbound
Issue pages built to rank for the questions people actually search, including a new Data Centers page written and coordinated with LEF leadership. Article cadence and on-page structure designed to make organic search the site’s primary traffic source.
Website development
Development and ongoing management of lakeeriefoundation.org. New issue pages, video integration, content updates, and a WordPress publishing workflow the content engine plugs into directly.
Design and fundraising enablement
The full LEF brand system carried across print, digital and presentation. Magazine ad suite redesign. Pop-up banners and one-sheets for boat shows and public events. A Lake Erie tourism poster for testimony at the Ohio Statehouse. Advocacy correspondence to the Governor on H2Ohio funding. Board-level communications, partnership strategy and sponsor recognition materials.
Event coordination
Celebrate the Lake, before, during and after. Sponsor tier structure and recognition, a 120-slide looping program deck, auction signage, speaker introductions and the post-event content plan. Plus a full redesign of the LEF and Shores & Islands Ohio town hall presentation for community stakeholders.
The content engine
A marketing operating system that monitors Lake Erie news every weekday, tags it to LEF’s pillars, and every two weeks drafts a pillar-focused article plus a full social batch with branded graphics and a scheduler-ready import. Everything is reviewed before it goes live. LEF gets a consistent publishing rhythm that does not depend on anyone finding time to write.
Outcomes
What it produced.
Reported January through April 2026. Numbers we have not verified are not on this page.
Facebook reach up 112%.
Against the prior period, with 90% of views coming from people who do not yet follow the page. That is the audience-growth number that matters for a nonprofit.
Organic search is now the largest traffic source.
At 54% of sessions to lakeeriefoundation.org. Inbound is working without paid spend.
Email holds a steady open rate.
Around 20% across eight campaigns to roughly 2,100 subscribers, with the newsletter consistently the top performer.
Celebrate the Lake 2026 sold out.
Individual tickets gone, sponsors confirmed across five tiers, and a program that put LEF’s research and engineering partners on stage.
The P-Filter project has a story now.
A produced explainer video, a full website feature, newsletter and social coverage, and a repeatable format for monitoring updates as results come in.
Advocacy with a paper trail.
Direct correspondence to the Governor on H2Ohio conservation funding, and materials supporting testimony at the Ohio Statehouse.
Social is doing awareness work here rather than driving traffic, and it is reported that way. A publishing system now runs without a marketing team: biweekly articles and a dozen or more social posts per cycle, drafted automatically, approved by a person, published on schedule.
