Most nonprofits publish great content once and move on. Here’s a step-by-step workflow for turning your existing reports, articles, and media into targeted content for different audiences.
Your nonprofit is sitting on a goldmine — of priceless content. You’ve no doubt produced dozens or hundreds of reports, guides, syntheses, blog posts, events, podcasts, and more. Each of these outputs takes a lot of time and effort — and contains valuable nuggets of insight. I’d wager that your comms team is exhausted trying to keep up.
Yet most mission-driven organizations fail to capitalize on the full value from this effort.
The typical nonprofit production cycle looks something like this: we spend months producing knowledge about a specific topic or program, publish it with excitement (and relief), and then post it up on social media and the newsletter. Move on to the next thing, rinse, and repeat.
This article presents a better way, demonstrating a practical two-part approach to reviving and repurposing your nonprofit content.
Rather than constantly reinventing the wheel, you’ll save time and make a bigger impact by digging into your existing content to find gold — and repackaging it to shine another day.
Part 1: Find the hot spots
To get started, we need to first identify what’s currently working well and resonating with our audience. To do so, follow the two steps below.
Audit existing content
The first step is to assess the value of your communications content. In a recent article, I shared three practical methods for conducting a content audit.
For this repurposing workflow, the easiest entry point is to create a basic analytics dashboard. With a handful of metrics, you can identify which pieces are attracting interest. With the dashboard, you can review data over a period of months and identify performance trends.
The pieces that perform the best are ripe for repurposing. Other pieces might simply benefit from updated information — current stats, new findings, latest news, etc.
Align with your audience
The final step for preparing your repurposing workflow is to connect your topics with documented audience needs. If you have created audience personas,* look at each persona’s pain points, goals, and values. Where is there alignment? Which of your existing pieces can mitigate their pain or help them achieve their goals?
For example, a watershed conservation nonprofit produced a report called “State of the Bay 2025,” which covers water quality trends, habitat restoration progress, policy updates, community engagement metrics, and funding needs.
Community volunteers might be interested in learning how volunteer-led restoration projects improved water quality in a local stream — linking to their interest in contributing to environmental initiatives in their backyard.
Donors might be more interested in larger systemic change, so they’d want to hear about how the organization’s advocacy efforts contributed to policy change in the region.
* If you haven’t conducted an audience analysis, check out these articles on audience personas and conducting interviews for some tips
Part 2: Revive and repurpose
Once you have documented your most promising topics to reach specific audiences, you can begin updating or repurposing your content. Here are some general approaches:
Update old-but-still-relevant content
You might have articles from three years ago that still drive traffic to your website. The general ideas are still solid, but the piece might contain some outdated content — old statistics, references to no-longer-current events, or other data that could be updated.
Rather than lose the search engine page ranking for these kinds of articles, you can update it, preserving the URL and its ranking.
Include any updated stats, figures, references, or other content to help refresh the piece. Then just add a line at the top about the update. You can add something like “Updated: Article originally published in May 2023, updated March 2026” or simply “Updated: DATE” to flag that this is recent content.
From long to short
Nonprofits typically have plenty of long-form materials like reports, guidance documents, and so forth. And all too often, these pieces are published, promoted for a short time, and then are forgotten.
That’s a lot of hard work gone to waste.
Instead, keep your reports alive by periodically pulling out key ideas and drafting short pieces around them. Ideally, target each new short-form piece to one audience segment.
For example, when I led communications for USAID’s Integrated Natural Resource Management program, we repurposed a long report on critical minerals. It was a high-value topic with lots of interest. But there were also many different entry points and perspectives. So we created a series of short “critical minerals reference sheets” that captured key ideas for specific audiences. For example, one of the pieces was geared towards senior leadership at USAID missions. Another piece targeted environment officers at missions. Different interests, different use cases, same topic.
From written to visual
Another approach involves converting your written content like blog posts and reports into short visuals. Compile a few key ideas per audience segment, and create visuals like basic infographics or diagrams, LinkedIn carousels, or video shorts. Share this “microcontent” in a social media series or integrate with other content like blog posts, annual reports, presentations, etc.
For example, a climate adaptation organization might pull out key insights from a technical policy brief to create two LinkedIn carousels: one geared towards donors with larger-scale impacts, and another towards local community organizations pointing to the outcomes of local grassroots efforts.
From audio or video to written
If you produce a podcast or videos, you’ll know that a lot of work goes into that production. You might have conducted an interview with a leading figure for topic X. Review the transcript and pull out the big ideas — once again tailoring them to specific audiences.
You’ve got yourself a series of three or four targeted articles and social media posts just from that one interview. In many cases, you can milk that content for weeks or months, returning to key ideas as needed in your editorial cycle.
From many to one
Another valuable approach is to compile the best content under a general topic to create a “best hits” collection. You see this a lot in other fields, with things like “The Ultimate Guide to Backyard Container Gardening”.
The idea behind this approach is to create areas of authority on specific topics. What are the topics you want your organization to be known for?
For example, World Wildlife Fund’s place-based pages like this one on the Amazon Rainforest capture a version of this idea. It aggregates ideas from a variety of subtopics, like wildlife, people and culture, threats, and WWF’s programs.
They don’t have to be painfully long — they just need to capture enough information about each subtopic to be useful to the reader. And then provide links out to the original piece. You also don’t need to use the term “ultimate” — the idea is simply to convey that this piece synthesizes a range of subtopics.
Creating a sustainable content system
Once you have a repurposing workflow, keep tracking it with your content audit spreadsheet. As the months go by, you’ll have ample data on what’s working, what can be improved, and what topics, formats, etc you should emphasize or eliminate. Give it some time, though, as it might take six months or longer before you start to see some clear insights.
Give it a shot — pull up your analytics for the last six months and identify your top three performing pieces. That’s your repurposing shortlist.
Like any new activity, creating an effective system takes time and effort to get it right. But ultimately, once you get in the groove, this approach saves you a lot of time and stress. You’re not constantly feeling the pressure to produce new content. Your team will be able to focus their energy productively, not reinventing the wheel with every new piece.
Above all, your organizational voice will ring loud and clear amidst all the noise — with clear and consistent messaging that speak to the values and needs of your audience.