Is Your Charity’s Message Getting Lost?
Good Charity Work Doesn’t Always Make Good Charity Comms…
Charities do extraordinary work, often in difficult circumstances and with far fewer resources than the scale of the challenge really demands. They support people through some of the hardest moments in their lives, tackle complicated social problems and provide services that communities simply could not do without.
Yet doing valuable work does not automatically make that work easy to communicate.
In fact, the more complex and important the cause, the harder it can be to explain clearly. There may be several services to represent, different audiences to reach and a great many people who quite understandably want their part of the organisation included. By the time the copy has passed through every department, working group and approval stage, the original idea can become rather difficult to find.
The charity still knows why its work matters. The problem is making sure everyone else can see it too.
When you know too much
People working within a charity live and breathe its work. They know the history of the organisation, understand how its services fit together and recognise the language used by funders, partners and other professionals in the sector.
That knowledge is invaluable, but it can also make it harder to see a communication from the outside.
Terms that feel perfectly natural within the organisation may mean very little to a potential supporter. Programme names, acronyms and familiar phrases can slip into copy without anyone noticing that they require explanation. A service may have evolved considerably over several years, while the language used to describe it has remained much the same.
None of this is unusual. Every organisation becomes familiar with its own language, just as every industry eventually starts speaking in a shorthand that makes perfect sense to the people inside it.
The difficulty comes when a reader is expected to understand too much, too quickly. A supporter opening a letter at home does not have the background knowledge of the fundraising team. Someone looking for help may be encountering the organisation for the first time, perhaps while already under pressure. A person scrolling through LinkedIn is unlikely to stop and untangle a paragraph written primarily for internal approval.
They need a clear way into the story.
That does not mean dumbing down the work or pretending that complicated issues are simple. It means deciding what this particular audience needs to understand first, and resisting the temptation to explain everything at once.
When everyone needs something included
Charity communications often have a great many people to satisfy.
The fundraising team may want a stronger appeal. Service teams may want more detail and nuance. Senior managers may want the communication to reflect the organisation’s wider strategy, while trustees, partners and funders may all have their own perfectly reasonable concerns.
The problem is rarely one obviously bad suggestion. It is the gradual accumulation of sensible additions.
A paragraph is added to explain another service. A second statistic is included because the first does not tell the whole story. The headline becomes longer so that nobody feels their priority has been overlooked. A second call to action appears, followed perhaps by a third. After several rounds of comments, the communication may be impressively comprehensive while no longer being especially clear.
Approval by committee does not usually destroy an idea in one dramatic act. It wears it down politely.
This is why someone needs to protect the central thought throughout the process. Not because other contributions are unimportant, but because a single letter, leaflet, email or social post cannot carry the full weight of the organisation.
The useful questions are often the simplest ones. What is this communication trying to achieve? Who is it really for? What is the one thing the reader needs to understand? What should they do next?
Just as importantly: what can be left for another day?
One organisation, several audiences
Most charities are speaking to more than one group of people. There may be existing donors, prospective supporters, volunteers, service users, funders, professionals, partners and members of the wider public.
They all need something slightly different from the communication.
A long-standing supporter may already understand the organisation’s purpose and want to see what their donations have helped achieve. Someone unfamiliar with the charity may first need a simple explanation of the problem and why the organisation’s response is effective.
A service user may be looking for reassurance and a clear route to help. A funder is more likely to want evidence, outcomes and confidence in the organisation’s expertise.
The values and identity of the charity do not change, but the route into the story should.
Trying to speak to every possible audience at the same time often produces communications that are technically inclusive but connect properly with nobody. The message becomes broad, careful and difficult to disagree with, but also difficult to remember.
Good communication begins by accepting that not every piece has to do every job.
The most important person is not in the meeting
During the development of a campaign, much of the attention naturally falls on the people involved in producing and approving it. Has the service team checked the terminology? Is senior management happy with the emphasis? Have the appropriate programmes been mentioned? Has everyone had the opportunity to comment?
All of that matters, but the most important person in the campaign is usually not in the meeting. They are opening the envelope at home, reading an email between other jobs or scrolling past the post on their phone. They do not know how many rounds of amendments the copy went through, or how many internal priorities had to be accommodated.
They only see the finished result.
Does it make sense? Does it feel relevant? Can they quickly understand why the work matters and what part they might play in it?
Keeping that person in mind can help to settle many of the debates that arise along the way. Rather than asking which internal preference should take priority, the question becomes: what will help the reader understand and respond?
It sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to lose sight of once a project gathers momentum.
The work does not need making more impressive
Charity marketing should not be about dressing up the organisation’s work or making it appear more dramatic than it is. The importance is already there.
The job of good communication is to bring that importance into focus.
Sometimes that means finding the human detail that makes a large issue easier to grasp. Sometimes it means removing unnecessary language, choosing one telling statistic rather than five, or giving a complicated service a much clearer structure.
It may involve an emotional story, but emotion alone is not enough. The reader also needs to understand what the charity is doing, why that response matters and how their support can help.
The strongest idea should come from the work itself, rather than being imposed on it because a particular style of campaign happens to be fashionable.
A useful view from outside
After many years of working with charities, Wodehouse understands how easily worthwhile communications can become overloaded, diluted or shaped more by internal pressures than by the needs of the audience.
An experienced external perspective can create a little useful distance.
It can identify where familiar language is creating a barrier, where several messages are competing for attention or where the strongest part of the story is hidden beneath too much supporting information.
That does not mean arriving with a ready-made agency voice and applying it to every organisation. Quite the opposite. The work begins by listening: understanding the charity, the people it supports, the audiences it needs to reach and what the communication is there to achieve.
Our role is not to make the charity’s work sound more important. It is to help more people understand the importance that is already there.
Because when an organisation is doing genuinely valuable work, its communications should give that work the clarity it deserves.
Has an important charity message become difficult to communicate? Talk to Wodehouse about finding the clearest way into the story.
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