I'm at Texas Legal Services Center, overseeing their communications. I joined them in June 2018 after haphazardly stumbling into an interview for a social media manager position—assumedly being a shoo-in since I was then working at SocialMedia.org.
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In that initial interview, I had the good fortune of meeting the Executive Director-elect, who knew the value of clear communications. After a lengthy interview spent discussing the organization's marketing hurdles, she created the more overarching communications role that I'm currently in.
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About Texas Legal Services Center
Texas Legal Services Center is a statewide nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide high-quality legal representation, advice, advocacy, and education at no cost to underserved people across the state. With more than a dozen practice areas, our work touches almost every aspect of civil law that impacts low-income Texans.
Our vision is for all Texans to have access to justice regardless of income.
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Me at Texas Legal Services Center
Until I was hired, Texas Legal Services Center had never had a dedicated communications role. Attorneys who had a minor interest—but no professional experience—were creating materials for their own programs. To say the organization's branding was fractured is an understatement. I had inherited 38 social media handles, six websites, and over 40 years of marketing grime.
So there was a lot of clean up.
Auditing. I had to find out everywhere Texas Legal Services Center—as well as the programs which had been acting autonomously. And from there, I began reaching out to consolidate these listings or shutting them down completely.
Learning. My next project was to dive into each Texas Legal Services Center project to discover who their client population was, how clients find them, and what services they provide. These projects had siloed themselves based on the grants that finance them, but these did not resonate with our clients. Using journalism techniques, I did stakeholder interviews with members of the different teams to understand the legal services they provided—in laymen's terms.
Consolidating. On the client-facing side, we reworked language to break down the individual project silos to express the services each provided and the client population they served. This made it easier for the client to find the help they needed while positioning Texas Legal Services Center as a one-stop-shop for any civil legal aid needs.
Rebrand. In December 2019, we applied for a rebranding package offered pro bono by the boutique creative agency, Push 10. Early January 2020, we learned that out of the thousands of nation-wide submissions, Texas Legal Services Center was selected.
On-going Roles and Responsibilities
A lot can fit under the umbrella of communications. With less bandwidth and leaner staff, nonprofits communications cover more territory. I'm a team of one, and below are my ongoing duties and responsibilities.
Digital
I manage tlsc.org, southcentralpension.org, and (retiring) takebackhope.org—all client-first sites. I manage the Twitter handles and Facebook pages for both Texas Legal Services Center and TexasLawHelp.org (a website that Texas Legal Services Center manages but over Texas Access to Justice Foundation grantees must contribute content to).
Print, Community Outreach, and Press Relations
We have high success rates with printed materials that promote our monthly rural pop-up legal aid clinics, crime victims services, and programs that work primarily with the elderly. Creating these materials is a mixture: Always my copy, mostly my layout, sometimes my design, but never my photos or hand-drawn illustrations. We were lucky enough to find good friends early on who were down for the cause and donated their artistic talents.
Internal Education, Internal Communications, and Law Clerks/Interns
I coach attorneys and executives on presentation/public speaking techniques. I focus on meeting them where they're at and making sure they have tools that make them comfortable. Part of making them comfortable was making sure they knew how to talk about Texas Legal Services as an organization and explain the legal services in terms that their particular audience could understand. We've made major inroads in breaking down departmental silos by teaching our teams how to speak about the organization as a whole, which required a deeper knowledge of other programs' services and eligibility guidelines. Beginning this past summer, I oversee all of our in-house volunteers and interns—everything from recruitment to making arrangements for their educational goals.
Project: Online General Intake
This is the project that I am most proud of completing while working with Texas Legal Services Center. Our Business Systems Analyst and I built a proof-of-concept for an online, true general intake—with a budget of zero dollars.
What We Started With
Clients were forced to navigate a list of separate intake forms that corresponded with different Texas Legal Services programs. But most clients weren't coming to us knowing which program to apply for. On top of that, the population reaching out to us often have low literacy, less reliable tech, and little spare time to successfully search through an extensive list of programs to determine which best fits their legal need and which one they are eligible for.
Our Goal
We wanted someone to be able to complete our intake process under five minutes and immediately know if they qualified for our services. And if they didn't, we wanted to hand over a list of other resources—based on their answers—of organizations, articles, and free toolkits that could be of help. Prior to us launching this project, applicants had to wait for around three-months just to be told that we couldn't help them—something that we wanted to correct out of general kindness and respect for the applicant.
The Process
We performed a massive language accessibility audit—looking at the language other nonprofits and government agencies working primarily with low-literacy/low-income populations, studying language trends, and applying my background in Southern Literature to incorporate specific dialects. We needed to get a better understanding of the language this population was frequently exposed to and most identified with.
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But the most important part of the language audit was reading through every online submission Texas Legal Services Center had received in the prior 12 months. Every intake questionnaire had a place to 'Describe Your Legal Issue' in long-form—and how our clients approached that space was eye-opening and oftentimes heart-wrenching.
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The other portion was to dissect each program's services and what grant stipulations defined eligibility. We also considered which program could offer the most extensive legal services. From there, we mapped out how users would work their way through the system, finding their way to the program that best fit their needs. If the user were ineligible or we didn't have a program that could address their particular legal issue, we built in Resource Pages explaining why our organization was unable to help and included other organizations and resources that could help based on their interactions with our intake system.
The Result
One button, GET LEGAL HELP, centrally situated on our homepage that didn't require the client to know the exact program they needed to apply for. Ultimately, our intake system has 282 fields, 431 steps of logic, and 73 triggered emails. On launch day, the system accurately caught 87% of intakes—correctly determining eligibility, routing clients to the correct programs, and notifying the user immediately if they were ineligible.
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Project: Rural Pop-Up Law Clinics
We launched eighteen monthly virtual legal clinics in identified 'legal aid deserts'—defined by the distance from brick-and-mortar, traditional legal aid clinics—in rural areas across the state. When I was brought on, Texas Legal Services Center had established four of the clinics, but the clinics weren't seeing much traffic, and we didn't have the buy-in from the individual communities.
The Challenges
There wasn't the proper infrastructure for these clinics. Texas Legal Services Center uses nontraditional delivery methods—like legal lines or online chat—and had never had 'in-person' clinics. The organization's website was static, and the clinics were not featured on there; their only digital imprint was within TexasLawHelp.org's legal clinic calendar. Texas Legal Services Center manages TexasLawHelp.org, but over 40 other legal aid organizations contribute to it, and we could not give any special preference to our material. Our clinic listings were getting lost on that site, leaving us with zero advertising.
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Beyond that, we were outsiders—and a lot of the communities were suspicious, insulted, and did not want big-city folks coming in to solve their problems. While initial work had been with the local legal administrations, it never trickled down or was translated for the members of the communities who could most use the services. We needed delicate, tailored communications plans. And we needed a place to point those communications back to for more information on how to receive services and to legitimize our organization.
Migrating the Site, Finding an Intake Module, and Establishing Internal Workflow
The current Texas Legal Services Center site was hosted locally on someone's computer, and couldn't be accessed or interacted with outside of that workstation. We needed to migrate the site—and fast. But while considering a platform to move it to, we had to consider if it would work with a cost-effective plug-in that could handle the 18 clinics and—most importantly—allow our clients to select an appointment timeslot that worked best for their schedules.
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The majority of legal clinics have a walk-in model, but the rural areas meant clients may have to drive long distances into town, and we build our model with a heavy emphasis on respecting our client's time. We didn't want anyone to drive into town, have to wait for long periods, perhaps find out that they weren't even eligible for services, or not get seen at all because of the nature of first-come-first-served.
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We found a plug-in that wasn't meant for scheduling but had a live limited choices function where we could build in timeslots that clients could choose, reserving that time for them. Triggered emails confirmed their appointment and notified our paralegal, who looked over the information they submitted to determine eligibility. If they were ineligible, she notified the client immediately and reopened the timeslot.
Communications: Building Trust in the Communities
We started compiling local media lists for each clinic location—which was harder than expected. Many of these communities regularly turned to small publications that were print-only, therefore almost impossible to find online. Or the small magazines, local papers, and radio stations only web presence was on Facebook. We worked with our clinic host locations—mostly libraries, community centers, and schools—to get a list of local media outlets and an introduction.
Once we were in contact, we wanted the attorneys assigned to that clinic to be the one participating in interviews. It made the clinic feel more friendly and suggested our long-term investment in the community. But it involved a lot of coaching. It is all too easy to get into the weeds and explain how locations were chosen, which were based on unflattering data like the percentage of poverty, medium age, and education levels. Or to talk about the clinic services offered in high-level legal terminology. I helped the attorneys nail down our elevator pitch, learn how to translate legal terminology into laymen's terms, and feel comfortable doing all of this in their own voices.
The Result
We were able to launch all 18 clinics within the timeframe proposed in the initial grant. Our clinics are regularly full, with some locations frequently having clients on the waitlist. We're doing an audit of the clinics with less traffic, and trying out new methods to fill them—like Facebook Events, donated ad packages, and becoming more involved in local interagency councils.
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You can see more about how the clinics work in this presentation.
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Project: #friendsofTLSC Campaign
This idea was simple, yet novel in that very few people—let alone organizations—do it any longer: Thank our friends in a thoughtful, tailored way. The centerpiece was 250 handwritten postcards thanking our friends, for well, being our friends. There was an accompanying digital campaign highlighting special relationships and encouraging digital mailing subscriptions.
The Goal
Genuinely, we wanted to thank all the individuals—whether they be referrers, allies, or donors—that help Texas Legal Services Center fulfill our mission. But we also wanted to build out a nonexistent digital mailing list, a database of our external contacts, and prime recipients for our first ever end-of-year appeal.
How We Did It
We created an online form for staff to submit names, affiliate organizations, mailing addresses, and—crucially—that person's relationship to Texas Legal Services Center. Crucial because what could have been reduced to a generic "thank you" was elevated by acknowledging the recipients' unique contributions to our organization.
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The investment was minimal: The postcards were gifted to us by our printer (another #friendofTLSC), postage, and a pizza party to incentivize staff participation.
The Result
We now have a database of external contacts we frequently work with, where before, when our staff left, we would lose those contacts. The campaign reinforced our current relationships and encouraged others to enter into relationships, knowing that their participation wouldn't be taken for granted. Within two months, over 200 subscribers have opted-in to our digital mailing list.