Black motherhood is targeted by racist systems. Midwives can make all the difference.

Honoring The Black Midwife

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Soul Fire Farm: Uprooting racism in the U.S. food system with agriculture | More in Common

Haus of Hoodoo: Jessyka Winston Wants To Teach The Truth About Vodou

WGTA PODCAST- EP. 9 PART 2: OUR LITTLE RED ONE SHOP

The Healing Power of Plant Based Living with Afya Ibomu | Koya Webb

How Black herbalism became a hashtag, and the true history behind it.

The Cultural Theft of Medicine

How Black herbalism became a hashtag and the true history behind it.

How Gary Vee Thinks about NFTs | My First Million #209 with Gary Vaynerchuk

Get all the digital and social media predictions that are fit to print, or at least type, from The Black Sheep Agency.

2022 Digital Forecasting

The online landscape is about to get a whole lot more wild.

Movistar: Love Story

H&M Conscious: Bring it on

Propaganda Bandwagon - Old Navy Commercial

Always #LikeAGirl

Things Go Better With Coke

Full Pepsi Commercial Starring Kendal Jenner

Beats By Dre | Powerbeats Pro | Unleashed

Febreze Commercial-Josh's room

Samsung Note 9 Dongle (DEX) Commercial

He Said Cigarettes To Women Are "Torches Of Freedom"

FLEX  TAPE® Commercial

The word propaganda carries a lot of negative weight compared to the word advertising. Propaganda is associated with evil, manipulation and a dystopian society. Whereas advertising is associated with an annoying, unavoidable but scrollable, part of our day-to-day life.
One feels harmful, the other feels harmless. 

Propaganda is limited to a specific agenda or mission. Advertising builds upon that by adding in goods, services, and ideas. Many, if not all of the day-to-day ads we scroll past or walk by incorporate some level of propaganda to pursued you into buying that said good, service, or switching up how you view something.

Propaganda in Advertising

Making a list, checking it twice and shopping sustainably, which feels very nice.

Black Sheep 2021 Gift Guide

For flocking around the Christmas tree and other season's festivities. 

Let’s look ahead to a world run by Gen Z.

The Generation of Forward Thinking

Understanding the vibrant lifestyles of a new generation.

Gen Z on Exploring Identity

What to know about the next generation of social change.

The Activism of Generation Z

Giving Tuesday: A Day of Global & Digital Giving

A guide and history of Giving Tuesday, the world's largest generosity day.

Balancing mourning with collective ritual and celebration

Acknowledging the violent history behind the Thanksgiving celebration we've come to know and expect is critical, and in an age where preserving tiem for family and friends is increasingly important, it might be time to incorporate new traditions to your Thanksgiving repertoire. Here are a few things you can explore this year to embrace the preservation and memory of the indigenous people affected by imperialism in the history of the United States.

Now is a great time to incorporate new traditions to your Thanksgiving celebration.

A roast worthy of a turkey, but instead focused on what makes us truly grateful this season.

Here's to the American Tradition

Let's give it up for turkeys, football and violent misunderstandings

What the heck does it mean to be a ‘B Corp’?

People over profits: the B Corp Series

Or, “What the heck does it mean to be a ‘B Corp’?”

Top 5 Takeaways from our November Workshop

Get the Workshop recap on 2022 nonprofit planning (and see what's to come!). 

The Top 5 Takeaways from our November Workshop 

Don't Succumb to Inevitability

Here's a playlist curated by the Haus of Hoodoo with some certified bangers.

Homesick with Hoodoo

Knowing when to leave and start over is a superpower.

The Quitter's Guide to Boundaries

The Metaverse is a term to describe something that isn't good, so why are Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Sweeny so interested in making it a reality? Let's take a consequences based look at the Metaverse, and discuss whether it's a new digital playground, or an inevitable dystopian capitalist nightmare.

The Metaverse

I went to the Metaverse and all I got was this stupid t-shirt.

The Age of Isolation

Care loudly and often, especially when others don’t want you to. Dissecting the extremes of American activists, and why you don't need to fit an exaggerated role to make a difference.

Activism is for Everyone

Care loudly and often, especially when others don’t want you to.

Help Out With Hurricane Ida Recovery Efforts

We are actively collecting resources for rebuilding in the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Ida.

Help Out in Hurricane Ida Recovery Efforts

Resources for rebuilding in the Gulf Coast

For years, the advice to every nonprofit was some version of "be more like a brand." Post more. Sound more polished. Chase the same tricks beverage and mattress companies use to win attention. But that advice is going out of date fast. 

Here's the good news buried in the shift: being human, being rooted in a real community, telling the truth about the work you do - these used to just be things nonprofits talked about. Now they're becoming part of how the algorithm decides who gets seen.

Let’s be real, the social media feed you're posting into isn't the feed you learned on. There are three changes to pay attention to here:

You are no longer broadcasting to your followers. You're being matched to people by interest, whether they follow you or not. According to Meta, only 17% of time on Facebook and 7% on Instagram goes to content from friends and family. The rest is strangers' content, served by an algorithm reading for interest, not relationship. This means that follower count matters less than it used to; what your organization is actually about matters way more.

For a decade, the game was capturing eyeballs at any cost, but that game is almost out of runway. This new reality rewards the meaning people seek out, instead of the noise people scroll past. A nonprofit was never going to out-shout a beverage brand for attention, and it doesn't have to start now.

Bots now account for more than half of all web traffic, the first time automated activity has outpaced human activity online. Add the flood of low-effort AI content built to trigger a reaction, and feeds get louder, faker, and angrier by the month. Outrage travels, so platforms keep rewarding it, regardless of whether it's true.

Platforms are starting to notice the same AI slop we are, and they're building against it. As feeds fill with machine-made content, audiences and the platforms chasing those audiences are turning toward visible effort, texture and even imperfection. 

Authenticity is starting to get measured less as a brand value and more as "proof of process": can people actually see the work behind the thing? Instagram has begun actively suppressing reposted and aggregated content for exactly this reason. Original, human, made-for-the-platform work is now structurally advantaged, not just ethically preferable.

The appetite for this is showing up in surprising places too. Myspace's owners are reportedly plotting a relaunch, betting that algorithm fatigue is real enough that people will pay attention to a platform explicitly selling itself as an escape from optimized feeds.

Brands without a real story are feeling the squeeze from the other direction. Even insurance companies and mattress brands, categories built on being interchangeable, are now scrambling to act like media companies just to stay visible, hiring writers and building personalities where there used to be none. But your nonprofit isn't scrambling for any of that. The real stories, real people and real process you already have aren't a compliance requirement anymore. They're the raw material every faceless brand is spending real money trying to fake.

You're the expert. Make sure AI knows it.

The same shift is happening in search. More than half of Google queries now return an AI-generated answer before a person ever clicks a website. Being the credible, well-documented source those answers get built from is starting to matter as much as being the thing someone finds by scrolling. Same principle, different doorway: substance and legitimacy are becoming the input, not just the output.

No one knows your mission, your people, and your work better than you do. When someone asks an AI assistant how to get involved in your cause, that answer should be built from what you've actually published, not a stranger's guess or a five-year-old blog post. Making sure your own documentation is the source AI pulls from isn't just a search tactic. It's how you keep your story accurate and keep your work moving forward, instead of watching it get flattened into someone else's summary.

What this actually means for your nonprofit online

Here's the part that should feel like relief: none of this asks you to get louder, weirder or more "on brand." It asks you to do less pretending and more proving. Show the work. Show the people. Let the algorithm find you doing the thing you're actually good at, instead of trying to out-shout accounts that were never your competition to begin with or hoping to be stumbled upon via hashtag soup.

The real question is whether what you post could hold up to a stranger asking, "how do I know this is real?" That's a content question, a design question and a strategy question all at once, and it's the kind of work that's easy to know you need and hard to carve out time for.

That's the work we do at Black Sheep Agency. We help mission-driven organizations turn what's already true about them- the real stories, the real people, the real process- into content and strategy built for a moment when that's exactly what gets rewarded.

Why Nonprofits Might Finally Win the Algorithm

The algorithm now rewards real stories and community over polish and AI content. See why nonprofits are positioned to win the shift and what to do next.

The algorithm stopped rewarding polish and started rewarding (human) proof

Condensed

The algorithm now rewards real stories and community over polish and AI content. See why nonprofits are positioned to win the shift, and what to do next.

The Black Sheep blog is turning up the volume on community engagement, social media strategy, Houston happenings and what it means to lead a purpose-driven life.

The Black Sheep Agency | Social impact and nonprofit blog

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