This means their decision to give, buy, or follow is an act of the heart, informed by the head.
Creator helps you shape the message, voice, and creative that move your audience to respond.
Start a conversation →Most fundraising and marketing fails the same way. It explains when it should land. It informs when it should move.
But the brands that work best make people feel something before they understand something.
Creator’s job is to find the feeling at the center of your work, and shape every message around it.
We start at the center.
Then we work outward.
Most leaders can describe what their organization does. Few can name why. And until they can, their audience won’t either. This means no real connection, no real conviction, and no real movement.
A Brand Soul is the DNA of your organization. It’s who you are. Not a version, not an expression, the thing itself.
Find it, and your audience can finally relate to you the way they relate to a person they trust. Because at its core, fundraising and marketing isn’t a transaction. It’s a relationship. Different from human relationships, sure. But the same dynamics are at play.
Everything downstream flows from there: the messaging, the voice, the visual identity.
Your Brand Soul should hold three things together.
For over two decades, Derek has helped mission-driven organizations move people to respond. He founded Creator in 2021 to do that work directly.
Select past and current clients
A new tagline. A refreshed logo. A website redesign. The outputs look different, but the organization underneath still doesn’t know who it is, so none of the new work sticks.
Messages scatter. Teams improvise. Donors hear different versions of the same story. And the brand drifts right back to where it started.
The problem isn’t the output, it’s the order. Most brand work moves outside-in, starting with the visible parts and hoping they reveal the thing underneath. Creator works the other direction.
Brands aren’t built. They’re found. The finding happens in three phases.
This is the DNA of your organization.
A Brand Soul™ isn’t a tagline, a headline, or a campaign theme. It’s the irreducible core of who you are, named in a phrase built from three things:
Your Brand Soul is never stamped on materials. But it’s woven into everything you say and do. It’s the internal plumb line that keeps an organization aligned as it scales across audiences, regions, and complexity.
You don’t create your Brand Soul. It’s already there.
This is the framework that gives your Brand Soul a body.
Soul without structure can’t scale. Phase 2 is where your Brand Soul gets a spine. The load-bearing parts that hold everything else upright: positioning, audiences, archetype.
This is how your Brand Soul speaks.
Strategy is only useful when a writer can write from it, a fundraiser can raise from it, and a campaign can launch from it. Voice is what makes that possible.
Most brand work rushes to Voice. New tagline. New messaging. New website. But language without a soul is just noise, and language without a structure can’t scale.
Soul. Structure. Voice. In that order. Every time.
The full strategic engagement is for organizations ready to do something deeper than refresh their messaging. Leaders who know the next chapter of growth requires finding who they are at the core, not just sharpening what they say.
It’s for organizations whose work has outgrown the words used to describe it.
Looking for focused project work? See how to work with us.
Most relationships start with one engagement and grow from there.
A specific piece of work, scoped to a specific outcome.
A fundraising appeal. A website refresh. A brand audit. A campaign that needs copy and creative direction. Projects are how most clients find their way into Creator.
If the fit is right, projects often become the start of something longer.
For founders and organizations whose brand has outgrown a single name.
Brand Architecture is the work of figuring out how many brands you actually have, and how they relate to each other.
It’s the work for organizations with multiple programmatic arms, for founders whose personal name and business name have started to blur, and for leaders building something bigger than a single brand can hold.
Get this wrong, and every downstream decision sits on a foundation it can’t support: strategy, identity, messaging. Get it right, and the rest of the work has somewhere clear to land.
For organizations ready to find their emotional center.
A full strategic engagement moves through three phases: Brand Soul (the DNA of your organization), Structure (positioning, differentiators, archetype, audiences), and Voice (tagline, tone, messaging, Brand Manifesto).
This is the flagship. It’s the work that shapes everything downstream: every campaign, every appeal, every decision about what to say, what to make, and what to leave alone. When visual identity is part of the work, it’s delivered through Creator’s longstanding design partnership.
For organizations ready to turn brand strategy into a working system.
Brand strategy gives an organization its center. But strategy doesn’t run a campaign. Between the deck and the donor sits the system a team needs to operate, and most don’t have one.
This is the engagement that builds it. A communications audit names where messaging is drifting and where the brand isn’t showing up. A working framework brings clarity to how campaigns get planned and how creative gets directed. Veteran fundraising writers from Creator’s bench come into the work onboarded and ready to execute. A measurement approach helps the team see what’s working.
The team comes out of this engagement with a system they can run, and a bench they can trust.
For organizations whose brand work has become ongoing.
This kind of engagement usually starts smaller. A copy project becomes a brand engagement. A brand engagement becomes ongoing creative leadership. Each step earned.
This isn’t a service you buy. It’s what happens when a strategic engagement reveals there’s more work to do, and the relationship is strong enough to carry it. Creator takes on a small number of these at a time.
Embedded creative leadership across campaigns, teams, and channels, without a full-time hire. Monthly retainer.
Derek Scott has spent the last 23 years helping mission-driven brands find language that actually moves people to act.
For 16 years at Dunham+Company, he worked downstream of brand strategy: creative directing, writing, and editing the fundraising and marketing copy those strategies had to survive. He ended as Chief Creative Officer. Then at Stripes, he moved upstream and started writing the strategies themselves. Across both, he was exposed to dozens of brand strategies built by some of the best minds in the industry.
That vantage point taught Derek something most strategists never learn: the strongest strategies aren’t the ones that look best in a deck. They’re the ones that survive contact with a fundraising appeal, a major donor proposal, or a website headline. The ones that give a copywriter something to work with, not something to decode.
That gap between the strategy in the deck and copy in the real world is where Derek learned to work. Most strategists can’t write the copy. Most copywriters can’t think the strategy. He does both, because he had to.
Derek founded Creator in 2021 to write copy directly.
As much as he loved it, clients kept asking for the work that comes before the copy. The strategy. The positioning. The framing that makes the copy smarter and work harder. The pattern became impossible to ignore.
That’s when Creator went upstream.
Today, Creator does brand strategy work first, grounded in two decades of learning what actually moves people.
This isn’t just work Derek is good at. It’s work he was created to do.
That conviction comes from faith as much as from craft. Derek believes the people behind mission-driven work have been called to it. And he believes he’s been called to help them move the audiences they’re meant to reach, and move them to respond.
He reads every inquiry. He takes every discovery call. He leads every Brand Soul session. The work that goes out under Creator’s name is work Derek has done himself, with a small team of trusted collaborators when an engagement calls for them.
No account managers, no junior team doing the thinking. Just strategy from someone who’s done it at scale, delivered directly to the leaders who need it.
A project manager with 15+ years in agency operations keeps the work moving. A trusted network of writers, designers, and producers rounds out the team.
When the work calls for logos, type systems, color, and identity systems, Creator delivers visual identity through our longstanding design partnership. The strategic work and the visual work come from the same room, on the same brief. Most clients don’t know how rare that is until they’ve worked the other way.
Creator also partners with agencies like BLVR, who brings Creator in for brand strategy and verbal identity work.
The Creator logo is a stencil. That’s the point.
A stencil has rules. Fixed edges. Predictable form. It’s the head: the proven structure of what moves people.
But a stencil sits flat on the page until a hand picks it up. Chooses the color. Sets the pressure. Decides where to start. That’s the heart: the human craft that turns structure into something a person actually feels.
Heart-and-head response is what Creator was built for.
Derek reads every inquiry personally and responds within two business days.
The form helps us understand the shape of what you’re working on so we can come to the conversation prepared.
One idea worth sitting with, and one thing to do about it. From Derek Scott, founder of Creator.
Looking for the Words That Work archive? It’s all here.
One issue a month. Just one idea to act on from someone who’s spent 20+ years helping mission-driven brands move people to take action.
I’ve been quiet for about nine months now, and here’s what happened while I was gone: AI learned to write an even better fundraising appeal.
Not a great one. Not one that really moves anybody. But decent. Clean, competent, grammatically correct. The kind of copy that used to take a junior writer an afternoon now takes about nine seconds and costs nothing.
Last year, week after week, I talked about how to write better. Kill the adverbs. Ditch “help us raise.” Cut the exclamation points. Every one of those lessons still holds, and I stand by all of them.
But I have to be honest with you about something: a machine can do most of it now with the right prompts. And unless you’re an expert at gauging the quality of its work, you’ll go with what it gives you.
A while back I wrote a post called “Don’t Fear ChatGPT,” and I meant it. I still do, though the tool I actually use now is Claude. I use it every day. It hasn’t flattened my craft. It’s sharpened it, and given me more time to think and more room to iterate. AI is a good tool in the right hands.
But after using AI for a few years now, I’ve learned something I didn’t expect.
When competent copy is free, competent copy stops being an advantage.
Think about that for a second. If every organization can generate a clean, correct appeal in seconds (and they can), then clean and correct is now the floor. It’s table stakes. The price of entry, not the edge.
So what’s the edge?
It’s the one thing AI can’t fake. The feeling at the center of your work. The reason you exist that has nothing to do with your programs or metrics. The thing a donor feels in their chest before they’ve understood a single word of your case for support.
AI can arrange words, but it can’t find your Brand Soul™. It’s never cried at a “Little House on the Prairie” rerun (that’s me, and I’ve made my peace with it). AI holds no convictions. It’s never sat across from someone whose life your mission changed and felt the weight of that. AI can imitate feeling, but it can’t feel. And donors, give them some credit, can tell the difference.
Which brings me to why there’s a new name up top.
This isn’t Words That Work anymore. It’s Your Move.
That’s on purpose. Words That Work was about the craft of copywriting: the mechanics of language, the fixes, the tips. Useful stuff. But the mechanics aren’t where this gets won anymore. It gets won upstream, in the feeling and the why, long before a single word gets written. And that part isn’t my move to make. It’s yours.
So here’s how this works now. Once a month—not every week, because this deserves more room than a quick tip—I’ll bring you one idea worth sitting with, and leave you with one thing to actually do. Not “cut your adverbs.” A machine can do that. This month’s move is something only you can make.
Here’s your first one.
Write a single sentence that says why your organization exists.
Not what you do. Not how you do it. Why you do it. The belief underneath the programs. The thing that would still be true if you lost your funding, your building, and your name.
One sentence. It’s harder than it sounds. Most leaders can describe what their organization does in their sleep, then go quiet when you ask them why. That silence is the most expensive thing in your fundraising, because until you can name the why, your donors never will either. And they’ll never be moved, again and again, to engage with you.
So that’s your move. Find the sentence. Sit with it. Don’t hand it to a machine. This is the one part it can’t do for you.
If this exercise turns out to be harder than you thought it’d be, let’s talk. Naming the why at the center of your work is the hardest and most valuable thing an organization can do, and it’s where everything I do at Creator begins: finding your Brand Soul™.
Your Move lands once a month, and each gives you one idea you can take to move your people to take action.
Last month I told you competent copy is free now. A machine can write a clean, correct appeal in seconds, so clean and correct isn’t the edge anymore. It’s the floor.
This month, it’s the one thing no machine will ever do, and most people can’t either.
Feel what someone else feels.
I’ve always been able to read a room. To feel what people aren’t saying, sense how they’re doing before they’ve said a word. For a long time I internalized that as “too sensitive,” and some days I still catch myself believing it. But it’s the same instinct that makes me good at this work.
Because here’s what fundraising actually is, underneath the appeals and the campaigns and the CRM:
It’s one person trying to make another person feel something true enough to act on. And you can’t make someone feel something you haven’t felt yourself.
That’s empathy, not sympathy. Sympathy looks at someone from the outside and feels bad for them. Empathy climbs into their chair and feels what they feel. It’s the difference between “these people need help” and “I know what it’s like to lie awake at 2 a.m. doing the math and coming up short.”
Donors can tell which one you’re writing from. Every time.
Here’s the hard part, and the reason most fundraising misses. You’re too close to your own mission to feel your donor’s.
You live inside the urgency. You know the budget gap, the deadline, the child who won’t eat a meal tomorrow if the number comes up short today. So you write from your urgency. And your donor, who woke up thinking about their kid’s tuition and a tense email from their boss, feels none of it.
The gap between what you feel and what they feel is where most appeals quietly die.
Closing that gap is the entire discipline. It isn’t softness or weakness. It’s the most rigorous thing in this work: setting down your own urgency long enough to feel someone else’s life.
AI can imitate that. It can generate a sentence that sounds empathetic, but it’s never laid awake at 2 a.m. It’s never felt anything at all. And the human being on the other end can feel the difference between words that sound like feeling and words that come from it.
So here’s your move this month.
Before you write or review your next appeal, pick one real donor. Not a persona. Not “our average supporter.” One actual person whose name you know.
Write down what you think they could be feeling in the 60 seconds before they open your letter or email. Then write to or review the copy with that person, and their feelings, in mind.
This is harder than it sounds, because it requires you to leave your own chair. But that’s the one thing a machine can’t do, and it’s the whole reason your words will land when everyone else’s slide off.
This is most of what I do at Creator, and it’s the part I still can’t fully explain how I learned. If sitting in your donor’s chair is harder than it should be, that’s where I come in. Let’s talk.
Your Move lands once a month, and each gives you one idea you can take to move your people to take action.
Later this month, Nike comes out of the S&P 100. Eighteen years in the index of America’s hundred biggest blue-chip companies, and on September 21 the most famous sportswear brand on earth drops out because it isn’t big enough anymore.¹ Revenue flat for the year. Profit down. China down again.² The CEO called last quarter the low point, which is what every CEO calls the quarter he’s standing in.
I’ve been holding Nike up as an example for most of my career. I still am. The example just changed.
Two months ago I asked you to find the sentence, the reason your organization exists that has nothing to do with your programs. Last month I asked you to feel what one donor feels before you write her a word. This month I want to talk about the thing your donor actually gets from you, because Nike just spent five years showing the world how easy it is to lose.
Here’s what I mean. Scott Bedbury, the man behind “Just Do It” and later the brand chief at Starbucks, called the core of a brand its mantra: three words, and each word has a job.³ The first is emotion, how people experience you. The second is a value or a category, what you hold dear or the ground you stand on. The third is product, what people actually get. Nike’s mantra is Authentic Athletic Performance. Disney’s is Fun Family Entertainment. Starbucks’ is Rewarding Everyday Moments.⁴ Say them slowly and you can hear the three jobs. I’ve pointed to those three brands in more conference rooms than I can count, because nobody has ever done the form better.
Somewhere along the way I noticed that the ministries I work with never put a category in that middle slot. Every one of them reached for a value, and not a value they’d picked, a conviction they’d been called to. A company chooses a market it wants to dominate. A ministry gets called to something. So I kept Bedbury’s form, made the middle word conviction, and started calling the whole thing a Brand Soul. I’ll write about that middle word another month. This month is about the third word. All three of my shining examples have spent the last few years losing it. Two of them are now clawing their way back. Nike isn’t there yet.
Authentic Athletic Performance built the most valuable sportswear brand in history, and then Nike decided cool mattered more than sport. Fashion over runners. Retro over innovation. An appetite for approval, from the culture, from the critics, from everyone but the athlete, and while the company was busy being admired, Hoka and On walked off with the people who actually run. Elliott Hill came in two years ago and said it on his first earnings call: “We lost our obsession with sport. Moving forward, we will lead with sport and put the athlete at the center of every decision.”⁵ He’s been saying it ever since. The numbers still haven’t caught up.
Nike isn’t alone. It’s just the one still in the hole.
Starbucks was never about coffee. Rewarding Everyday Moments meant the third place, the chair you didn’t have to give up, the barista who knew your name. Then somebody looked at the numbers and saw that mobile ordering and drive-thrus were faster, and faster was cheaper, and the stores turned into pickup counters with a mosh pit around the hand-off shelf. The ads still promised the moment. The stores delivered a transaction. Brian Niccol said it plainly a few months after he took over: “I think we got confused that mobile ordering could solve the entire business. I think we got a little confused that the drive-thru could solve the entire business.”⁶ He’s since renovated more than a thousand stores, brought back the seating and the ceramic mugs, and same-store sales were up 7.9 percent last quarter.⁷ He didn’t invent anything. He started delivering the third word again.
Disney’s three words were Fun Family Entertainment, and for most of a century that’s what you got. Then the company started chasing approval, from critics, from activists, from a cultural moment, and families who had trusted Disney for three generations started to feel lectured instead of entertained. The logo still said family. The product delivered a message. Attendance and box office told the story before anyone inside the company would. Eventually Bob Iger did: “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.”⁸ Read that again. The CEO of Disney had to remind Disney what Disney makes. The parks and the films have been carrying the company home since, and the man who ran the parks took over as CEO this spring.⁹ They’re clawing their way back.
Here’s what I want you to notice. Three companies, three different temptations. Starbucks chased a buck. Disney chased approval. Nike chased cool and approval both. And all three lost the same word. Not the emotion. The ads never stopped being warm, or magical, or fierce. Not the category. Nobody at Starbucks forgot they sold coffee. What slipped was the product, the thing the customer holds in her hand, because the product is the word management can tinker with.
You can’t redesign an emotion. You can redesign a store.
And nobody ever votes to demote the product. They vote for a faster line, a broader audience, a hotter collab, and the product slides to second place one good decision at a time.
Now, you’re not Nike. But you have a third word too, and you can lose it exactly the same way.
Your product is not your program list. It’s what a person gets when they engage with you, and for a ministry there are two people engaging: the one you serve and the one who gives. The child gets a Bible she can read. The donor gets to be the reason she has it. Both of those are your product, and both can slip.
They slip for the same three reasons. Efficiency: you automate the thank-you, batch the newsletter, and turn a relationship into a pickup counter. Approval: you start writing for peers and foundations instead of the donor, and the letters start to sound like a grant report. Cool: you chase the rebrand, the new platform, the campaign everyone’s talking about, and somewhere in there the donor stops getting the thing she signed up for. None of those decisions are wrong. All of them are candidates for the slot.
And you won’t see it in the budget. You’ll see it in the appeals, because the appeal is where your product either shows up in the donor’s hands or doesn’t.
I watched this up close with a ministry whose whole reason for existing is Scripture. Before we started, I asked their writers what the appeals were for, and I got a direct quote back: “raising money for,” and then the name of the ministry. That was the product as they understood it. So the letters had turned into inventory. How many people served, how many countries, how many programs, all of it true and all of it interchangeable with a dozen other good organizations working in the same places. The donor opened the envelope and got an invoice. What she was supposed to get, and what that ministry had been handing people for decades, never made it onto the page. They hadn’t stopped delivering it. They’d stopped delivering it to her.
One more thing from Nike before I let you go. Saying the sentence is not the same as living it. Hill has had the right words for two years, and on September 21 the company pays for the years it didn’t. Knowing your product is a start. Delivering it, every letter, every time, is the work.
Two parts.
First, finish this sentence for both of your people. When someone we serve engages with us, they get ______. When a donor engages with us, she gets ______. One phrase each. If the second one is “to support our work,” you haven’t found it yet. That’s what she gives, not what she gets.
Second, pull your last three appeals and read them as the donor. Not as the writer, not as the board. Ask one question at the end of each: what did I just get? If the answer is a request, an update, or a list, the product didn’t make it into the envelope. If the answer is the thing you’d put in the third slot, you’re home.
Don’t hand either sentence to a machine. It will fill them in for you in a second, and they’ll be perfectly good sentences about somebody else.
Most of the organizations I work with know exactly what they deliver. What they’ve lost is the habit of delivering it to the donor. If your letters have started to read like inventory, that’s where I come in. Let’s talk.
Your Move lands once a month, and each gives you one idea you can take to move your people to take action.