
Second Harvest Northern Lakes Food Bank was founded with a compassionate and bold vision to create a hunger-free NE Minnesota and NW Wisconsin. Through the compassion and commitment of their donors, volunteers, agency partners, board and staff, they take a strategic approach to feeding the hungry. Each year they rescue and distribute over 7.7 million pounds of nutritious food, enough food for 6.2 million meals, to approximately 53,350 people in need.
The hunger relief community is a passion area for the gish&co. staff, so when Second Harvest Northern Lakes found themselves in need of marketing and communications support, we were thrilled to make the connection. Read on for how we collaborate with this critical partner in the fight against hunger in the Northland.
Social media support
For small organizations, social media can feel unruly, time consuming, and like just another thing that has to be dealt with among the myriad priorities. But social media is also a critical tool to engage the community in fundraising efforts, to get the word out about events, help raise awareness about your cause, and also help folks get connected to food assistance if needed. gish&co. collaborates with the Second Harvest Northern Lakes team on deploying strategic, timely, and effective social media efforts to meet the organization’s goals.
website refresh
If you’re anything like most nonprofits, you blink and suddenly your seemingly just-redesigned website is already out of date. Pages constantly need updating, your too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen editing approach has led to inconsistent formatting, and things just start to feel stale. Second Harvest Northern Lakes engaged gish&co. to assist with a website refresh, beginning with an audit of the current site and ending with a refreshed look and feel for a reasonable cost.
fundraising support
All small nonprofits struggle to figure out the best balance between hiring consultants and bringing in full-time permanent staff. For Second Harvest Northern Lakes, a sweet spot has always been to have an outside firm support the organization with fundraising efforts, but manage some of the digital execution internally. Once gish&co. came onboard as the primary marketing team, we took on the digital components of the fundraising plan—from social media advertising to email marketing.
outsourced marketing
Organizations of a certain size don’t always need full-time marketing support from an FTE. While the workload is ample, the specialties required by folks who run marketing efforts are hard to find in one person, especially at small nonprofit salary budgets. gish&co. exists to fill this gap—to help leaders like Second Harvest Northern Lakes’ executive director Shaye Moris meet her marketing objectives, leveraging the insights and experience of marketing experts without having a full-time employee dedicated solely to marketing.
Sample work



“As a small non-profit, it was difficult to find the right skill set to implement our marketing efforts internally. Digital and other media change rapidly and gish & co. has allowed us to stay ahead of the curve, adapting and changing to trends in marketing. We’ve propelled as an organization and I give credit to their knowledge, expertise and effort.”