Every fortnight, we run an open Digital Q&A session for charity and nonprofit teams – a chance to bring your questions and challenges: the things you’re stuck on, the decisions you’re not sure about. You can find out more and sign up for a future session here.
This fortnight’s session was a smaller, more intimate one, writes Matt Saunders. We had representatives from a refugee support charity, a disability and mental health charity, and an LGBT+ young persons’ organisation – and the conversation ended up going deep on a few really meaty topics. Here’s what came out of it.
Q: I’m juggling comms, fundraising, events, and grants – all at once. How do I manage my time and still make room to learn?
This is a common issue for small teams, and unfortunately there’s no magic answer – but a few practical things came up in the discussion that are genuinely worth trying.
The first is time blocking. It sounds simple, but blocking out your calendar for the week ahead – including time for learning, not just tasks – gives you a sense of control that helps manage stress as much as it helps manage workload. The plan will never survive contact with reality, but having it means you can respond to disruption intentionally rather than reactively. As someone put it in the session: plans are worthless, but planning is essential.
The second is weekly priority alignment with your manager. If you’re carrying too much and not sure what to focus on, a short weekly check-in to agree on priorities can take a lot of mental weight off your plate. You don’t have to figure it all out alone.
A third thread that came up – particularly useful for learning – is finding your high-productivity context. For some people it’s a café, for others it’s a library, for others it’s literally being on a train. Once you know what unlocks your focus, you can use it deliberately rather than hoping it happens by chance. Accountability also helps: studying alongside others, even silently over Zoom, can replicate the ambient focus of being in a shared space.
Q: We put effort into social media posts asking for volunteers and donations, but get almost no engagement. Meanwhile, a quick photo of our clients gets loads of likes. What are we doing wrong?
Nothing surprising here, but it’s still frustrating. The honest answer is that social media platforms are increasingly built around passive consumption – and algorithms are actively deprioritising content that isn’t paid for or isn’t generating the kind of quick emotional reactions that keep people scrolling. If you’re not paying to surface your content, you’re largely at the mercy of an algorithm that has very little interest in helping you recruit volunteers.
That doesn’t mean social media is useless – but it changes how you should think about it. Rather than seeing social as the place where conversion happens, we’d suggest treating it as the top of the funnel: a way to make people aware of you and bring them into a relationship with your organisation. The conversion – the volunteer signup, the donation, the event registration – happens somewhere else, usually via email or a form on your website.
Which brings us to the mailing list. Email consistently outperforms social for driving action, and it’s a channel you own – you’re not at the mercy of an algorithm. If you’re not actively growing your list and using it well, that’s probably where the energy is better spent than trying to crack the social media code.
There’s also a question worth asking about what “engagement” actually means in your context. Likes and reach are vanity metrics. What matters is whether someone took an action you wanted them to take. Tying your social posts directly to a specific service, event, or form – and then tracking whether that drove signups – gives you much more useful information than follower counts.
Q: How much attention should we be paying to our WordPress SEO plugin? We’re spending a lot of time trying to get the green lights and it doesn’t seem to be making a difference.
Not much. The Yoast-style SEO plugins in WordPress are a useful guide, but they’re not the arbiter of whether your pages rank. Chasing green bullets can become a time sink that doesn’t translate into meaningful results – especially if you don’t have a clear picture of what traffic you’re currently getting from search and what it’s doing when it arrives.
Before spending more time on SEO, it’s worth taking a step back and asking: what do we actually want people to do when they visit our website? And are the right calls to action visible and easy to find? In the session, we noticed that the newsletter signup for one organisation was buried on a page that most visitors would never think to look. That’s a much more immediate problem than keyword optimisation.
Unless you’re seeing clear evidence that search traffic is a significant channel for you, SEO can probably go on the back burner for now. Focus on the actions first – what do you want people to do, and is the website making that easy?
Q: Our management want to see numbers. How do we report on digital in a way that’s actually meaningful?
The instinct when management ask for numbers is to reach for the big ones – website visits, social impressions, follower counts. The problem is that those numbers don’t really tell you anything useful about whether your communications are working.
What tends to land better – and is more defensible – is tying your reporting to actions. How many people signed up to volunteer this month? How many enquiry forms were submitted? How many people registered for an event? And crucially: where did they come from? If you can say “we ran a social post on this date linking to this form, and signups went up by X”, that’s a story. “Our impressions were up 12%” is not.
It also helps to reframe the conversation with management from metrics to outcomes. What they’re really asking when they ask for numbers is: is our communications work having an impact? If you can answer that question directly – with evidence that’s tied to real actions – that tends to satisfy the question better than any dashboard report.
The thread running through everything
This session kept returning to the same underlying point: clarity on what you’re actually trying to achieve has to come before any decision about channels, content, or tools. Whether it’s social media strategy, website structure, or what to report to your board – the answer always starts with getting specific about the action you want someone to take, and working backwards from there. It’s harder upfront, but it makes everything else easier.
These sessions are always a reminder that the challenges facing charities aren’t really about size – they’re about resource, confidence, and finding the right place to focus. If any of the questions above resonated with you, we’d love to see you at a future fortnightly session. You can find out more and register here.
And if you’d rather have a one-to-one conversation about what any of this means for your organisation specifically, feel free to get in touch with me at All Things Equal – this is exactly the kind of work we do.