Four years running a chapter taught her what a marketing plan looks like when nobody on the team has a salary.
As chapter Regent for a Phoenix chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Lezlee Alexander watched membership climb from 90 to 120 in four years. “My efforts and sense of FUN over routine processes increased membership, from 90 my first year as a DAR Chapter Regent to 120 at the end of my fourth year,” she says. The common assumption is that a volunteer board needs help from someone who has never sat in one of its seats. Alexander built her growth from inside the board table instead.
Lezlee Alexander, owner of Read. Write. Engage. in Phoenix, previously served three terms as Arizona State President for the Children of the American Revolution.
The View From the Board Table
Lezlee Alexander’s case for how nonprofit marketing should work starts with a claim about who is doing the listening. “Being able to listen to needs, what’s worked, identifying parameters of an organization are key to developing a focused strategy to move forward,” she says. The idea is not that boards need better graphics or a livelier social feed. It is that a marketing plan for a volunteer-run organization has to be built the way she learned to build one: from inside a leadership seat, not alongside it.
Most of the organizations she has worked with, she says, run without a single salaried staff member, no executive director, no paid marketing person, just people volunteering time on top of jobs and families. The audience for that kind of marketing is rarely the volunteers already inside the organization. It is the wider public: people who might become a donor, a volunteer, or a participant if the message reaches them the right way, and then get funneled toward wherever their interests actually fit the organization’s needs.
The habit dates to a deliberate decision. Alexander left a thirty-three-year career as a hospital physical therapist in March 2023, at a point when post-COVID hospital work meant less time with patients and more risk to her own health. “There were also the very real personal health risks of the environment for myself and potentially placing my family at risk which I couldn’t bear,” she says. She opened Read. Write. Engage. the following month, turning skills she had already built for nonprofits into a paid practice.
Proof at the Chapter Level
The DAR chapter she led as Regent is the clearest test of that idea. Membership rose from 90 to 120 over her four years in the role, a gain she attributes to treating engagement as something to enjoy rather than a task to check off. Under her tenure, the chapter began showing up at city chamber events and local parades, adding visibility the group had not pursued before. She also built the chapter’s website herself, a skill that spread past her own chapter: state DAR leaders adopted the same template server option after seeing her work, and other chapters began modeling the newsletter she had started, which is still running.
Growth surfaced its own problem. A change in chapter officers midway through her tenure altered the group’s dynamic and raised friction she had not planned for. “One thing that surprised me or that I’d do differently now, paid more attention to a change in officers,” she says, treating it less as a marketing failure than a reminder that a nonprofit’s internal team, its personnel management, needs the same deliberate attention as its public-facing message.
The same idea holds outside a chapter setting. Alexander has spent roughly a year working with an author who arrived with no website and no marketing plan of any kind. She started with a strategy session and a logo concept, which he then reworked into something closer to his own voice. They built his website together on a template-based platform, and he has since taken over managing it himself, to the point of adding items for sale. The pattern is consistent across both engagements: she starts inside the client’s own priorities, hands off the tools, and lets them run what she built.
What connects the DAR arc and the author’s website is not a formula but a habit: start with what the organization or the person already has, and build the strategy around what is actually workable for people doing this on top of something else.
What Volunteer Leaders Can Take From This
Lezlee Alexander’s answers point to a short list of moves rather than a formal system, and every one of them is something a volunteer board, a solo entrepreneur, or a first-time author can steal and run inside their own organization without hiring anyone first. It works whether the organization has one leader or twelve.
Strategy Before Tactics
Start with a conversation about strategy and brand, not a tactic. Before opening a social account or hiring a designer, Alexander begins every engagement with a discussion of what the organization or person actually stands for and who they are trying to reach. Skipping that step is the most common reason a marketing effort produces activity without results. That order, strategy before tactic, is what let the DAR chapter’s later moves, chamber appearances, parade visibility, a newsletter other chapters copied, land instead of scatter.
Identify which emotion or story pulls a specific audience in. A membership drive, a fundraising appeal, and a volunteer recruitment push are not the same conversation, even inside the same organization. Alexander’s chapter work grew because she matched activities, chamber events, parades, a revived newsletter, to what actually drew people toward the group, rather than running a generic outreach calendar. That match, activity to audience, is also what separates outreach that builds a mailing list from outreach that actually shows up at the next event.
Treat marketing as a team job if more than one person is leading. Where a nonprofit has more than one person at the top, Alexander’s approach is to listen for what has worked before and where the parameters of the organization actually sit, then build a strategy the whole team can carry rather than one person alone. Reaching that kind of internal agreement is what let her chapter’s tech decisions, the website template state leaders later adopted, come from consensus rather than one person’s preference.
Do the personnel work alongside the public-facing work. Her own account of what she would change, paying closer attention to a change in chapter officers before it altered group dynamics, is a reminder that an organization’s internal team needs the same deliberate attention as its outward message. That same discipline, watching the team as closely as the message, is easy to skip when growth feels like the only priority.
Triage the schedule before taking on new work. Marketing rarely arrives as someone’s only job; it lands on top of a board seat, a day job, or both. Alexander’s advice to anyone in that position is direct: “Do some deep thinking about your schedule and your sanity to determine what’s realistic for you to manage with a prioritized assignment list.”
Who Is Lezlee Alexander?
Lezlee Alexander is the owner of Read. Write. Engage., a Phoenix, Arizona based marketing and communications practice, and a former three-term Arizona State President of the Children of the American Revolution.
Alexander spent thirty-three years as a hospital physical therapist at Abrazo Health, closing that chapter in March 2023 as post-pandemic hospital work left less room for the patient time that had drawn her to the field. That decision meant leaving a role she had built her identity around for over three decades, but it let her treat nonprofit work, something she had long donated evenings and weekends to, as an actual practice. She opened Read. Write. Engage. the following month, bringing skills built through nonprofit leadership, website design, newsletter development, and membership outreach into paid practice for nonprofits, solo entrepreneurs, and authors.
Her nonprofit record spans several organizations at multiple levels. She served as Children of the American Revolution Senior State President for three terms, 2012 to 2015 and again 2022 to 2024, and as Senior National Vice President for the Rocky Mountain Region in 2018 and 2019. She was Regent of her local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter from 2016 to 2020, and has held Honorary Regent status since. She also served on the board and as treasurer of the Pioneers Cemetery Association from 2019 to 2021, and remains an active volunteer there, maintaining the organization’s website, writing weekly local-history blog posts, and producing its monthly newsletter. That volunteer proofreading work led to a credited role on the book Pioneer Cemeteries in Phoenix, Arizona, and to proofreading work with three other authors since.
The name Read. Write. Engage. describes the three skills she considers inseparable: proofreading, copywriting, and building content that actually holds an audience. That same habit, listening before writing, carries from the chapter roster she grew into the client work she does now. It is, in effect, the argument of her career: the work only lands when someone has already sat close enough to the mission to know what the audience needs to hear.
Lezlee Alexander is the owner of Read. Write. Engage., a Phoenix, Arizona based marketing and communications practice, and a former three-term Arizona State President of the Children of the American Revolution. To connect with Lezlee or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile.
