The Purpose Collective: Small edits, wider access
A live session for nonprofit communications professionals turned neuroinclusive writing into immediate editing choices—and grew into a public collaboration for Neurodiversity Celebration Week.
A newsletter can be full of good news and still make the reader work too hard.
The intention is usually generous. The real question sits in the cluster of small decisions around the message: a crowded paragraph, an unexplained acronym, a vague link, a heading in capitals, a subject line that hides the point. Each choice looks minor on its own. Together, they decide whether somebody can find the meaning quickly or has to wrestle it out of the page.
That was the starting point for Divergent Thinking’s work with The Purpose Collective, a nonprofit marketing consultancy, and its newsletter learning community. The online session, Writing Newsletters for Every Brain, helped communications and marketing professionals look at familiar content through a neuroinclusive lens.
The aim was not to turn every participant into an accessibility specialist in half an hour. It was to give them useful questions—and edits they could make the same day.
At a glance
Organisation: The Purpose Collective
Delivery: 21 August 2025
Audience: nonprofit communications and marketing professionals in the Monthly Newsletter Cohort
Format: 20-minute live walkthrough, ten-minute question-and-answer session and a practical take-away checklist
Focus: dyslexia-friendly newsletter design, plain language and reducing cognitive load
Immediate actions named by participants: larger type, shorter paragraphs, descriptive links and less use of all-capital headings
Follow-through: five-star reviews, interest in further accessibility learning and a guest article published by The Purpose Collective
The brief: useful before the next newsletter goes out
The Purpose Collective works with purpose-driven organisations on communications, marketing and fundraising. Its cohort brought together people using platforms including Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Bloomerang—different tools, but a shared challenge: how to make a newsletter clear enough for a busy reader to understand and act on.
Divergent Thinking designed the session around that real workflow. The examples were not abstract statements about inclusion. They were subject lines, links, headings, paragraphs and visual choices that participants could recognise from their own work.
The take-away needed to survive contact with a deadline. That meant prioritising changes with a low barrier to action:
make the key message visible early;
use headings and short sections to create a route through the page;
write link text that says where the reader is going;
favour direct, everyday language over ceremony;
keep alignment and contrast predictable;
explain abbreviations on first use; and
add meaningful alternative text when an image carries information.
These choices can support dyslexic readers, people with attention differences, readers working in a second language and anyone trying to understand an email between meetings. Accessibility becomes more compelling when it is understood not as a niche extra, but as good communication with a wider margin for human variation.
The moment “click here” stops being helpful
Vague links are a useful example because they look harmless.
“Click here” tells a reader how to operate a link, but not what is on the other side. Somebody scanning the page cannot distinguish one “click here” from another. A screen-reader user moving through a list of links may hear the same unhelpful phrase repeatedly. A reader with limited attention has to go backwards and rebuild the surrounding context.
“Download the volunteer guide” or “Book the September workshop” carries its meaning with it.
That single edit captures the wider philosophy of the session: remove the little puzzles that do not add value. A newsletter should not test whether the reader can infer the writer’s intention. It should help them find what matters.
Designing for cognitive load, not a mythical perfect reader
Cognitive load is the amount of mental effort a task asks somebody to use. A reader is not arriving at a newsletter as a blank page. They may be switching between tasks, processing stress, working on a phone, translating the language or holding several other priorities in mind.
Neuroinclusive editing asks what effort is necessary for the message—and what effort has been added accidentally by the format.
The session explored practical ways to reduce that accidental load:
Front-load the point. Let the first lines answer “What is this?” and “What do I need to do?”
Break up the route. Headings, lists and shorter paragraphs make information easier to locate and revisit.
Make actions concrete. A named action and deadline are easier to use than “Please respond soon.”
Use emphasis sparingly. If capitals, bold, italics, colour and emojis all compete, none of them creates a reliable signal.
Choose repetition that helps. A consistent layout lets readers learn where to find dates, calls to action and contact details.
The point was not to impose one rigid template. It was to notice the experience created by the page.
From interaction to intention
The session used interaction as an editing tool. Participants considered examples, noticed friction and connected the choices to their own newsletters. That mattered because accessibility advice is easy to agree with in principle and easy to postpone in practice.
The follow-up notes recorded clear intentions:
increase newsletter font size;
shorten paragraphs;
replace “click here” with descriptive links;
avoid all capitals for headings; and
review existing newsletters for dyslexia-friendly improvements.
Those are useful immediate outcomes. They are specific enough to be observed and small enough to begin without a complete redesign.
One participant wrote:
“This lesson helped me gain practical tips that I will implement in future newsletters as well as my day to day communications.”
That final phrase matters. Once somebody begins noticing cognitive load in a newsletter, they often start seeing it in meeting invitations, shared documents, instructions and everyday email too.
“I’ll be implementing many of the things I learned”
Ryane Acalin of The Purpose Collective described the session as wonderful, praised its interactive element and said the content was fascinating. Her follow-up ended with the strongest kind of response to practical learning:
“I’ll be implementing many of the things I learned today in my future communications.”
Further feedback praised both clarity and energy:
“Your content and delivery is superb! I think you had the perfect cadence and your material was very clear.”
The session later received two five-star reviews. The Purpose Collective’s CEO, Patty Breech, wrote that the team had really enjoyed the guest session and wanted to stay in touch for future opportunities.
These responses show more than satisfaction. They show that the learning felt relevant to the participants’ work, memorable enough to revisit and useful enough to recommend.
A workshop that became a public collaboration
The relationship did not end when the Zoom window closed.
For Neurodiversity Celebration Week 2026, Divergent Thinking and The Purpose Collective developed a guest article for the organisation’s own audience. The published piece, “Neurodivergent Communication: 5 Small Changes That Help Nonprofit Teams Work Better”, carried the same principle beyond newsletters and into everyday team communication.
The Purpose Collective’s team reviewed the article, added its editorial expertise and published it under Nat Hawley’s byline. During the process, the team said the piece was “fantastic” and that readers would gain real value from it.
That follow-through is significant. The original session created a shared experience for one cohort. The guest article turned the learning into an open resource that nonprofit teams could find, share and use later.
It also demonstrated the kind of relationship Divergent Thinking values: delivery first, useful material afterwards and an opportunity for both organisations to extend the conversation in a way that serves their audiences.
What accessible communication looks like in practice
For a communications team, neuroinclusion can begin inside the ordinary editing process.
Before sending a newsletter, ask:
Can a reader tell what this is about from the subject line and opening?
Is the main action described precisely?
Do the headings help somebody scan, or are they decorative?
Does each link make sense away from the sentence around it?
Are paragraphs short enough to hold their shape on a phone?
Have abbreviations and unfamiliar terms been explained?
Does the visual emphasis guide attention rather than compete for it?
If an image contains information, is that meaning available in text?
None of these questions asks the writer to remove personality. Accessible writing can still be funny, warm, urgent, challenging or beautifully distinctive. The work is to make the route into that personality easier to find.
What other organisations can learn from this case
The Purpose Collective collaboration offers three useful lessons for teams commissioning neuroinclusion learning.
First, place the training close to a real task. “Accessibility awareness” is broad. “Make next month’s newsletter easier to read” gives people somewhere to apply it.
Second, treat participants as practitioners. Give them examples to inspect, decisions to make and material they can take back into their workflow.
Third, let a good session travel. A checklist, a follow-up article or a second conversation can turn a useful hour into a wider organisational resource.
The most persuasive evidence of learning is often not a declaration that somebody understands accessibility. It is a changed sentence, a clearer link, a better-formatted page—and a reader who reaches the meaning with less effort.
Clearer communication is a form of welcome
The Writing Newsletters for Every Brain session began with tiny editorial choices. It led to immediate commitments, generous feedback and an independently published collaboration that continues to give the ideas a life beyond the original audience.
That is the value of practical neuroinclusion. It does not sit beside the real work. It improves the real work.
Divergent Thinking helped nonprofit communicators see that accessibility is not about flattening their message. It is about removing the unnecessary obstacles between the message and the person it is meant to reach.
Planning accessible communications learning
Divergent Thinking designs neurodiversity training and workshops for communications teams, nonprofit networks and purpose-driven organisations.
Sessions can be tailored to newsletters, campaigns, meetings, internal communication or customer information, with practical examples and resources that teams can apply immediately.
Contact nat@divergentthinking.uk to discuss a session built around the communication your organisation already creates.
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