Communications at the Point of Growth

Nick Norman

I work with organizations at moments of growth, when communications needs to mature into a real program.

When Growth Outruns Communication

As projects and organizations grow, communication naturally spreads across more people and platforms. Some information lives on the website. Some gets shared in community spaces. Some comes from a staff member’s personal social account. Partners hear things in meetings. Funders hear things through email. None of this is wrong. It’s just what happens as more people get involved.

The challenge is that these updates aren’t connected. There’s no shared place where communication is planned, coordinated, or thought through as a whole. As the work becomes more public and more visible, those parallel conversations can create confusion, misalignment, or unnecessary risk.

This is the point where a communications program becomes necessary. Not to control messages, but to give people a shared way to communicate so coordination can scale, trust is maintained, and work reaches further.

My work helps organizations design and put a coordinated communications program in place as growth accelerates—using shared systems, processes, and infrastructure that a dedicated team or community can run.

In practice, setting up a communications program involves a small number of phases:

  • Early-stage mobilization and planning

  • Stakeholder strategy and engagement

  • Building community to support the program

  • Communication systems and infrastructure

  • Guiding contributors through launch and handoff

This work is designed for organizations whose work spans regions, institutions, or public communities, where coordination becomes harder as scale and visibility increase.
Here are some of the global organizations and institutions Nick has supported as part of his work on major projects.

Where This Experience Comes From

My experience comes from spending years inside one of the world's largest global ecosystems at the Internet Archive. It's a digital library and web archive where programs, communities, and institutions operate together at global scale.

Since 2019, my work there has spanned communications, community support, major events, and highly public digitization projects all within the same ecosystem. Working across these efforts meant seeing how decisions, trust, and communication ripple across teams, partners, and continents rather than living in a single role or function.

Over time, that exposure made patterns visible. How informal communication works early on, and what starts to change as visibility increases. And what needs to be in place for communication to remain dependable over time.

That understanding eventually led to taking on a fellowship focused on building Open Library’s first formal communications program, applying what I had learned across the ecosystem to design something others could run.

The projects below represent my work across a complex, global ecosystem informing how I build communications programs at scale.

  • Open Library — Global Communications Program: Helped establish the first formal communications program for the world’s largest community-led digital library at the Internet Archive, serving 12M+ patrons worldwide. Explore Case Study →

  • $3 Million Community Transitional Housing Model: Led the design and launch of a scalable housing and services model, securing $3M in community pledges and cross-agency support within the first month. Explore Case Study →

  • UC Berkeley & Internet Archive — Digitization Partnership:Contributed to large-scale digitization of government records, expanding global access to public documents; work recognized with an Anthem Award for Best Use of Technology. Watch the Project Video→ Read the UC Berkeley feature → 

  • Internet Archive, 25th Anniversary Campaign: Served on the core content team for a global advocacy campaign during a landmark legal challenge, contributing to communications featured in 40+ international media outlets, including TIME, and recognized by the U.S. Congress. Campaign Highlights →  TIME Magazine, Related Reading →

  • The Wayforward Machine — Interactive Campaign: Co-produced an immersive social media experiment imagining a future without the Internet Archive, unfolding across founders’ and global partners’ channels. Explore Case Study →

  • Decentralized Web Camp (DWeb Camp) — Global Convening: Co-produced a global convening of 500+ participants from six continents, supporting both in-person and distributed online communities across global nodes and advancing collaboration around decentralized web technologies. Read More →
FEATURED CASE STUDY

Building a Digital Communications Program

Open Library · Internet Archive | Communications Lead Fellow & Emeritus

Overview

Open Library is the world’s largest open, nonprofit digital public library, serving millions of readers worldwide. It is one of many major projects within the Internet Archive, a global digital ecosystem that supports libraries, archives, and open access initiatives at scale.

As Open Library grew, demand increased for new features to improve the experience and help patrons navigate the library. Communicating about those resources and producing content at a large volume and frequency could no longer be handled informally, leading to the need for a dedicated communications program.

The Challenge

That work took place within a unique structure. Open Library has its own public presence while being stewarded by the Internet Archive, one of the world’s largest global digital ecosystems. Communications needed to work both for the Open Library community and within the broader Internet Archive context. It also had to fit alongside established departments within Open Library such as engineering, design, librarianship, data imports, and a large global volunteer community.

Within that environment, I worked in close partnership with Open Library leadership to design and set up its this communications program. The work focused on strategy and planning, community participation, communication infrastructure, and guiding contributors through launch and handoff.

From Build to Handoff

Because Open Library is an open-source project, communications could not operate as a centralized team controlling output. Instead, the program needed to support open contribution while maintaining clarity and trust. This led to the creation of a shared communications homebase, clear collaboration practices, and a content system that allowed multiple teams to work in parallel.

As the program stabilized, the focus shifted from building internal structure to strengthening outward-facing communications. Leadership was then handed off to communications professionals with deep journalism and public-facing experience. The systems put in place during this period continue to support Open Library’s communications today.

Annual Communications Update (October 2024) An end-of-year program update marking the transition from infrastructure building to public-facing communications execution. (Video Presentation Length 3:28)

How would you like to collaborate?

I’m open to a few different ways of working, depending on what your organization needs right now. If you think there may be a fit, use the form below to get in touch.
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