Bilingual Communications for Family Services

Family services nonprofits — child welfare, foster care, family preservation, parent support — work with audiences whose first language is often Spanish. Communications that treat Spanish as a translation step miss the families they are supposed to serve.

The challenge

Family services communications carry weight that other nonprofit comms do not. A foster placement update in awkward Spanish reads as cold to the family receiving it. A parenting class invitation translated badly never converts to attendance. A donor appeal about Spanish-speaking families written entirely in English signals that the organization talks about the community more than it talks to it.

What I deliver

• Bilingual program and family communications. Updates, invitations, intake forms, post-program follow-up.
• Bilingual donor communications. Annual appeals, year-end campaigns, major-gift cultivation that respects the bilingual character of the work.
• Editorial: bilingual annual reports and impact stories. Built in both languages from the brief.
• Bilingual training materials for caseworkers and family-facing staff.

Where the work connects to my career

The integrated bilingual campaign I led at SOS Children's Villages USA — partnering with HuffPost and Johnson & Johnson — doubled the organization's web traffic and built a model for family-services storytelling that combined English and Spanish-language outlets without translating.

"A donor appeal about Spanish-speaking families written entirely in English signals that the organization talks about the community more than it talks to it."