Tabletop Marketing

This is a great opportunity from Social Venture Partners Dallas for early-career professionals (from all industries!) who want to explore how they can use their skills and experience for good. Applications are open now!

Love this article about “knowledge translation,” which basically just means taking all of that great data you’ve worked so hard to capture, and translating it into useful communications assets. “Knowledge translation asks organizations to stop thinking about research dissemination as a final step and start treating it as a design problem: who needs to know this, what do they need to do with it, and what format will actually reach them?” The author spells out 7 steps, and we want to echo all of them: 1) Start with audience and action, not content 2) Name the gap your research closes 3) Match the format to the audience 4) Apply plain language from the start 5) Involve the audience in the process 6) Plan for distribution before the product is finished 7) Repurpose strategically across outputs https://lnkd.in/gffNG8FP

We're halfway through 2026! Some favorite moments from the year... 🎓 Meeting the brilliant marketing students at SMU Cox School of Business 🥂 Celebrating Dwell with Dignity at Arsin Rug Gallery and The STUDIO 📚 Speaking on marketing + storytelling at Highland Park Literary Festival 🎤 Cheering on the SVP Dallas Advisee nonprofits at Spark Tank 🐶 Snapping photos downtown with Downtown Dallas Parks Conservancy and Nick Denman 👏 Connecting with some of Dallas's coolest ladies through D CEO's Emerging Women Leadership Network 🍦 Ending meetings with soft serve with Sarah Hughes (10/10 recommend) ☕ Pausing to share inspiration, tacos, and treats at our quarterly team Tabletalk ...and that's just what made it to the camera roll! Time flies when you're having fun and have the best partners and clients.

Yes! This brief article does a great job of arguing something we’ve been trying to articulate for a while. Yes, donors want relationships. But a sense of belonging and community is often even more important — like-minded people coming together under a shared cause and working together toward a shared goal. That can be so powerful. "Most nonprofits are fighting a retention battle with better content. But the real fight is a belonging battle they haven't entered yet. The organizations that will matter most in the next decade won't win because they had the best email plan. They'll win because they built something people actually want to be part of — community with a real identity, real stories, real stakes, real shared effort. That's not a content problem. It's a community design problem." ^^ This article is a quick read that's relevant to just about every nonprofit we know. https://lnkd.in/erfMEFkd

We're looking forward to joining the panel at Communities Foundation of Texas' Giving Day Success Series on August 7. The most effective nonprofit social media feels human. Behind it is thoughtful campaign planning that makes every post work toward the same goal. We'll be joining fellow panelists from The Dallas Opera, The Love Pit Rescue, and 101Media to share practical ideas for creating content that builds your audience, strengthens engagement, and supports fundraising goals. If your organization is participating in North Texas Giving Day 2026, this free workshop is a great opportunity to sharpen your approach before campaign season begins. Along with the panel discussions, you'll have the chance to connect with peers and explore resources from organizations across the nonprofit sector. Open to all organizations registered for North Texas Giving Day 2026. We hope to see you there! https://lnkd.in/g-Vcj43u

This week, we kicked off work with Dwell with Dignity to promote their next holiday retail pop-up, and it's got us reminiscing about The STUDIO Premiere Party this past spring. This night was a blast. Lizzie made out like a bandit, scoring a gorgeous console and light fixture. Even bigger bonus: We got to bring our mom along. ❤️ If you're in Dallas and love interior design, you don't want to miss Dwell with Dignity's pop-ups. Every purchase helps fund home transformations for families who have overcome homelessness. So proud to serve Dwell with Dignity!

We have loved partnering with Downtown Dallas Parks Conservancy on its recent video series with Evo Lineberry of Wilderline, exploring downtown parks through the eyes of a horticulture expert. From native plants to the design decisions that shape each landscape, the series gets to show off details most visitors walk past every day. Projects like this remind us that great storytelling doesn't always need a new destination; sometimes it simply needs a new perspective. 🌼 Check out their page for more in this series!

Woohoo! A huge congratulations to Teresa Charnock and the whole Dwell with Dignity team! $480,000 raised at The STUDIO is incredible. But also, one of the coolest things about our client Dwell with Dignity is that they have built an actual community around this work--designers, volunteers, donors, partners, advocates. People genuinely showing up for each other and for the mission. You can feel it the second you walk into The STUDIO! The whole thing feels thoughtful, welcoming, creative, and very, very cared for, which feels pretty aligned with an organization built around the idea that everyone deserves dignity in their home. We’re always so happy to get to work with the Dwell team and grateful to be a tiny part of what they’re building.

A strategic plan should probably do more than collect dust in a shared drive, right? A couple years ago, our client Philanthropy Southwest built the “PSW Impact Engine” into its strategic framework, including a focus area around Ideas & Innovation. Instead of keeping that strategic focus internal, they decided to turn it into a content campaign. That's where the Ideas & Innovation video series came from. Alongside PSW, we created this series to feature foundations across the Southwest that are rethinking how philanthropy works and where it can go next. The Tabletop team got to travel to Austin, New Mexico, and Oklahoma talking with leaders doing thoughtful, experimental, deeply human work. Honestly, exactly the kind of project we love being part of. We're so excited to see these videos come to life! The full series is here: https://lnkd.in/ec8MbaKN

For our 4th year in a row, Tabletop Marketing returned to the Highland Park Literary Festival to talk storytelling with high school students. In our workshop, Short & Sweet: Crafting Micro-Stories for Brands, we explored how the skills they’re sharpening in literature class— tone, rhythm, word choice— are the very same tools marketers use every day. We compared brands like Liquid Death and Evian. Same product. Totally different tone. Then we put them to work. Students wrote five-sentence stories in assigned tones and (yes) read them out loud to the room. The right words, chosen carefully, can make a story resonate, whether it’s for a brand or on the page. Grateful to the Highland Park Literary Festival organizers for having us back!