Most nonprofits I’ve worked with already run a fair amount of marketing; it just doesn’t sit in one place or go by that name. Development runs donor campaigns, communications handles storytelling and press, volunteer engagement does its own outreach, and advocacy works to a policy calendar of its own. Much of that work is skilled. Almost none of it is coordinated with the rest.
Before Cedar Collaborative, I spent two years as a staff member leading marketing and communications at a large statewide food bank. Fundraising, communications, volunteer programs and advocacy ran in parallel there, each competent on its own terms. Advocacy kept the most distance from the rest. Nobody seemed to have chosen that; it had built up over years. No one asked me to bring the teams closer together. It happened because I made myself useful to each team on its own terms first, and that put me where I could see one team’s work already helping another’s, often without either of them noticing.
The obvious cost of this arrangement is duplicated effort, and there was plenty of it. The larger cost is that donors hear several versions of an organization that has one story to tell. A volunteer who spends a Saturday morning sorting food rarely hears how that morning connects to an advocacy win months later. Each function measures itself by its own idea of success, and the organization ends up smaller than the sum of what its people are doing.
The usual remedy is structural: redraw the org chart, form a committee, write a shared plan. I don’t think that often works, because the separation has its reasons. A team that has run its own lane for years has built expertise in it and a sense of ownership over it, and neither transfers because a chart says so. What I’ve seen break the pattern is a person with enough standing across functions to notice where the work overlaps, and enough patience to earn each team’s trust before asking anything of it.
That arrangement is fragile. When the person leaves, the lanes tend to come back, since nothing structural was holding them together. I’ve watched an organization return to fully separate teams years after a real stretch of cross-functional work. Nobody had shown that the separated version worked better; it was simply how that corner of the sector had always done things.
A fractional CMO can supply that standing without the cost of a full-time executive hire, which most nonprofits can’t justify. The job is to find where the pieces already connect and to build the shared measures and working habits that keep them connected. In my practice that finding comes first, before anyone plans a campaign.
The closest familiar role in the sector is the interim executive director, and the comparison helps partly because boards mix the two up. The Interim Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector 2025 Report was commissioned by Third Sector Company and written by Nancy Bacon from conversations with more than 100 interim leaders in the U.S. and Canada. It finds that confusion between interim, acting and fractional roles is still common. The interim it describes is a temporary executive who steps into a leadership vacancy, stays about ten months on average, and often arrives because the board waited until a crisis. A fractional CMO fills no vacancy; the executive director stays in place throughout. Each still comes in as an outsider who can name what’s happening without years of internal politics attached, and each is meant to leave the organization stronger and no more dependent on them than before.
That last aim is harder than it sounds for both roles. If the integration I’ve described lives mostly in one person’s attention, a fractional leader who does it well and then leaves could simply be scheduling its undoing. The interim profession’s answer is a deliberate handoff: documentation, lessons captured, a board prepared for the next leader. I build toward the same thing, with shared measures and, where the budget allows, a full-time hire who inherits the relationships instead of starting over. Even so, an organization can choose to go back to its old lanes, for good reasons or poor ones, and no handoff prevents that. The most a handoff can do is make going back a decision someone has to make on purpose.