About The Constellation Collective
Since 2018, we've worked with foundations, independent schools, nonprofits, design studios, and people running small creative businesses largely by themselves.
On paper, they have almost nothing in common — a national foundation and a one-woman farm don't share a budget, a sector, or a staff. In practice, they want the same thing: to be understood by the people they're trying to reach, and to stop sounding like five different organizations while they're doing it.
We are a small practice by design.
The name is the method. A collective — a small core, with designers, developers, illustrators, and specialists brought in as a project requires them. Growing into a big agency was never the plan; staying small is what makes the work affordable and keeps the senior person on it.
You get the senior person. At a bigger firm, the people in the pitch meeting usually aren't the people doing the work — here there's no one to hand it off to. When a project needs more, we bring in people we've worked with for years, and manage them, so you don't have to.
Megan Canning, Principal
Photo: Liz Ligon
I'm a communications strategist.
I spent twenty-five years doing this work in New York — most recently as director of communications and special projects at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, where I built the communications strategy across everything the foundation did, from its artist residency program to the 2017 Rauschenberg retrospective at MoMA, brand partnerships with Warby Parker and Tate Modern, and a feature-length BBC documentary about the artist.
Before that, as deputy director of the Design Trust for Public Space, I led external communications through a full organizational rebrand — new mission and vision statements, a new website, a refreshed visual identity.
In 2018, I founded The Constellation Collective with Rachel Crawford on a specific premise: the organizations that most need strategic communications are often the ones least able to afford a large agency. Small independent businesses, mission-driven nonprofits, foundations, and artists with no communications department of their own. We built the firm to bring that expertise to them at a scale and a price that made sense.
Since then we've built brand strategies, named companies and programs, and written entire websites for Gowanus Music Club, North River Architecture, Zack's Mighty, Bridging Access to Care, Arts Ignite, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Trinity School, and Edible Schoolyard NYC — and for larger institutions too, including the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Creative Capital Foundation.
I'm also a visual artist, working in hand embroidery, paint, soft sculpture, quilting, and text. The two aren't separate lives. Both are made by hand, and both are about connection — getting something across to someone, and putting them in touch with something larger than themselves.
“Megan is a world-class thinker and facilitator with deep experience in nonprofit brand and communications. She has led this work both within nonprofits and at agencies that serve them. She’s masterful at guiding clients through complex challenges, and does it with remarkable care. She strikes a beautiful balance of warmth and rigor, so clients immediately feel they’re being supported by a thought partner operating at the highest strategic level.”
Let’s talk.
We do our best work with people who come in thinking out loud. If something here resonates, we'd love to hear what you're working on — even if you're still figuring out what to call it.
The point of the call is to see whether what we do maps to what you need. If it doesn't, we'll usually know someone whose work is a better fit.