What a Fractional
Marketing Director
Actually Does

01 A week is one conversation, one working session, and a stack of decisions.

A typical week holds a standing conversation with the Executive Director, a working session with whoever handles the day to day, and a running set of decisions that would otherwise pile up on somebody's desk.

The decisions are the work. Which of the four things competing for the same three weeks in October actually happens. Whether the new exhibition needs a campaign or a mailing. What the board hears, and when. Whether a vendor's proposal is worth what they are asking for it.

Around those, the job is oversight. Reading proofs. Checking that the newsletter, the print piece, and the signage say the same thing in the same voice. Noticing in September that the grant report due in March needs numbers nobody is currently collecting.

02 It does not replace your Communications Coordinator. It gives them something to work toward.

The most common version of this problem is a capable junior person carrying decisions that were never theirs to make.

A Communications Coordinator can write well, run the newsletter, keep the social accounts alive, and hold the calendar together. What they usually cannot do, because it is not their role and nobody has given them the standing for it, is tell a board member that a campaign is a bad idea, or decide that the fall program will not get its own mailing.

So those decisions get made by default. Or by whoever asks loudest. Or they do not get made at all, and the calendar fills with whatever arrived first.

A fractional director does not take the work away from that person. It takes the decisions away, which is usually the part that was wearing them out.

03 Nothing visible changes for about six weeks.

The first month is reading and listening. Past campaign results, list health, the program calendar, ticketing and donor data, and any marketing commitments already promised inside grant agreements. Alongside that, conversations with the people carrying the work, including whoever has been absorbing marketing tasks that were never in their job description.

If a board meeting falls in that window, I sit in. What the board already believes about marketing is usually the more useful thing to learn.

What changes first is the number of things being done, and it goes down. Most organizations are running more marketing than their capacity supports, which is often why none of it appears to be working.

The full six-month engagement structure is on the Approach page.

04 Four situations where this is the wrong hire.

Saying so costs me work and saves us both a difficult year.

There is nobody to execute. A director sets direction. If no one is available to carry it out, you need hands before you need a head, and a contractor or a part-time staff hire will serve you better.

Marketing is being asked to fix something else. If attendance is down because the programming is not landing, or giving is down because the case for support is thin, better marketing will make the problem visible faster without solving it.

The budget is genuinely not there. A retainer that strains the organization creates pressure to show returns on a timeline that does not match how this work compounds. That is a bad position for everyone in it.

Leadership is mid-transition. If a new Executive Director arrives in four months, they should choose their own marketing leadership. Wait for them.

05 Three questions you should be able to answer at the end that you cannot answer now.

What are we doing, and why that instead of the alternatives.

What did it produce.

Who owns it now.

Marketing leadership is not a campaign. It is the ability to answer those three without guessing, and to keep answering them after the engagement ends.