Mission-Driven Marketing: Building Infrastructure for Organizations That Matter
As a business leader member of the Design Economics Coalition, Andi Graham brings two decades of experience placing marketing strategy in service of mission. As founder and CEO of Big Sea, a Certified B Corporation and woman- and minority-owned digital agency, Graham has spent 20 years helping nonprofits, healthcare organizations, and cultural institutions grow their reach and deepen community impact. Her work embeds values into business structure, not just messaging.
How do you explain the real-world impact of what your business does?
Big Sea helps nonprofits, healthcare organizations, and cultural institutions grow their reach, donor base, and community engagement through strategic marketing and web design. When a refugee resettlement organization can tell its story more powerfully, it secures more funding and serves more families. When a rural health network ranks higher in search, more underserved patients find care. We measure our success by what our clients are able to do in the world—and over 20 years, that ripple effect has touched millions of lives across dozens of communities.
What metrics beyond profit do you use to evaluate your business’s success?
As a Certified B Corporation, we complete rigorous impact assessments measuring our practices across governance, workers, community, and environment. We also monitor the diversity of our client portfolio, ensuring we’re serving organizations working in underrepresented communities, not just the ones with the biggest budgets. Internally, we measure team equity, pay transparency, and staff development as indicators of whether we’re building the kind of company we’d want to work for.
What creative business models or practices have you implemented?
We operate as a Certified B Corporation and are woman- and minority-owned; structural commitments, not marketing positions. We offer fractional CMO services so under-resourced nonprofits can access senior marketing strategy without a full-time hire. And we’ve built our service model around sector specialization rather than chasing every client, which means our nonprofit and healthcare clients get partners who already understand their constraints, not an agency learning on their dime.
How have the changing needs of your stakeholders shaped your business decisions?
As nonprofits face increasing pressure to prove ROI to donors and boards, we’ve shifted from execution-focused engagements to leading with strategy, helping clients clarify their message before we build anything. The rise of AI has pushed us to invest in responsible content frameworks so mission-driven organizations can move fast without sacrificing authenticity. And as our clients’ audiences have diversified, so has our own team, because you can’t credibly market to underserved communities without reflecting them internally.
What changes has your company made to keep up with today’s economic challenges?
We’ve leaned into AI tools deliberately and responsibly, not to pad margins, but to expand what we can deliver within budgets our nonprofit clients can actually afford. When an organization is choosing between a new program and a marketing investment, we want to be the agency that makes that choice easier. We’ve also tightened our service focus, doubling down on the sectors where we have the deepest expertise so we’re not wasting client resources on our own learning curve.
About This Interview
Design Economics Coalition members complete a self-interview exploring how their work connects to the three tenets of design economics: acknowledging change, embracing creativity, and cultivating literacy. These responses help connect professionals across sectors who are working to evolve economic systems.
Interested in joining the coalition? Contact us to learn more about membership.