Arizona Community Foundation
Bringing philanthropy to life on social
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Sector
Services
Arizona Community Foundation is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the Southwest, distributing over $70 million annually through scholarships, grants, and donor-advised funds.
After helping them relaunch their website, ACF came to Smith & Connors with a new goal: deepen engagement across social media channels and help Arizonans better understand the impact of their community-based philanthropy. We conducted a discovery and strategy phase that became the basis for a report and social media content strategy. Then, we created Canva social templates that made it easy for the communications’ team to generate content.
The Results
352,757
Total post impressions, up 80% in one year
+75%
Increase in frequency of posts by the ACF team
+38%
Overall engagement rate in one year
+31%
Followers on LinkedIn over one year
+97%
Impressions on LinkedIn over one year
The Challenge
Our approach
We grounded our work in strategy, conducting research to understand ACF’s audiences and identify content opportunities. Then we delivered a suite of tools to turn their internal team into a content orchestra.
Experience principles
Options and Pathways
Audiences should feel like there are lots of possible destinations. ACF’s social media should feel like a choose your own adventure experience.
Simple and Plainspoken
Everything will be clear. We’re never speaking over people’s heads. People should feel invited in.
Trust Is Paramount
We want to encourage the audiences to trust ACF through experiencing the foundation’s professionalism mixed with authenticity in social media posts and engagement.
Be a Mirror
Visitors should see themselves represented and included in posts — this is about the community.
An always-on content strategy supports “crescendos” and overarching communications goals.
Design & visual identity
We refreshed the social brand with a flexible system of templates that could accommodate everything from event invites to data highlights, tailored for Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.
Flexible templates allow the team to promote a variety of content types.
Carousels give the ability to tell powerful linear stories.
Some specific templates make generating drumbeat content easy.
Timeline templates allow the team to tell their story, full of rich history.
Canva buildout and training
We built branded Canva templates and a comprehensive brand kit, empowering internal teams to create on-brand graphics quickly and consistently. Through custom screencasts and a Canva user guide, we helped ACF staff confidently take ownership of content creation.
The Canva User Guide gives their team a comprehensive look at all of the templates available to them. It can also support new team members as an onboarding guide.
The Brand Kit gives their team access to important brand assets, like logos, fonts, and color palettes, making it easy to stay brand-aligned when creating content.
We also provide screencasts that their team can use for training and onboarding of new team members, helping with the adoption of this new tool.
The social media strategy S&C helped us build and implement led to significant growth, including a remarkable 97% increase in LinkedIn page impressions and the successful launch of our new Instagram channel, which quickly garnered strong initial engagement. Their strategic guidance and design template system have elevated our brand, our social media presence, and our ability to engage with community members across Arizona and beyond.
Jennifer Foley
Vice President, Marketing & Communicationsnde omnis
Project Scope
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Brand Identity -
Marketing & Communications
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