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 brought together a nursing studies foundation, a rare disease charity, a dialogue and professional development organisation, and a survivors’ support charity – writes Matt Saunders. The conversation ranged across LinkedIn strategy, website messaging, donations, conference promotion, and Google Ads. Here’s what came out of it.
Q: We’ve moved away from Twitter and want to make LinkedIn work better for us. Our organisation page doesn’t feel conversational or effective. Where do we start?
LinkedIn pages do tend to feel more broadcast-y than conversational – that’s just the nature of the platform compared to something like Twitter. But there are things you can do to grow your presence and make it more useful.
The most practical starting point is to manually connect with people in your sector from your personal profile – senior leaders, commissioners, thought leaders, whoever your target audience is – and then invite those connections to follow your organisation page. It’s a manual process, but doing even ten minutes of it regularly will steadily grow your follower count with people who are actually relevant to you.
To drive more engagement on the page itself, try varying the content formats. Polls tend to get more interaction than standard posts. Slide documents and carousels can be more eye-catching than plain text. And you can comment on other organisations’ posts in the name of your page – which builds awareness without feeling like you’re promoting yourself directly.
One approach that works well is for individuals in the organisation to post from their own personal profiles and tag the organisation page – this brings their network into contact with the page organically. The key is that it needs to feel natural rather than salesy. Share a thought, link to something useful, mention the page in passing. People are very alert to anything that feels like a hard sell.
Q: We’re a rare disease charity covering a condition so niche that almost no one has heard of it. How do we build awareness and drive donations when our audience is tiny and scattered worldwide?
This came from an organisation covering two ultra-rare neurological conditions – one affecting around one in a million people, the other around one in ten million. It’s an extreme version of a challenge many smaller charities face: how do you find and reach an audience that doesn’t know it exists yet?
A few things came out of the conversation. First, partnerships with umbrella organisations in adjacent spaces – in this case, broader rare disease networks – can give you reach and credibility you couldn’t build alone. In the rare disease world especially, the culture tends to be collaborative rather than competitive, which makes this kind of relationship much easier to build than in larger, more crowded cause areas.
Second, because the terminology around rare conditions often evolves over time, it’s worth making sure your content references both current and former names for conditions – people searching based on older information need to find you too.
Third, if you’re the only organisation in the world covering this condition, you should theoretically rank very easily for relevant search terms. But that only works if the site has been set up with SEO in mind and the content is structured clearly. Getting listed as a reference on relevant Wikipedia pages is a straightforward win worth pursuing.
On donations specifically: the challenge flagged here was that it’s hard to make a small monthly donation feel meaningful when the impact is so hard to visualise. The answer is to lean into the story. Make it vivid. Help potential donors understand that because the condition is so rare, even a small amount of money goes a genuinely long way – because there are so few people working on it and so few resources available. That specificity, honestly told, tends to land better than vague appeals to impact.
And before anything else, get access to your own analytics. If you don’t know how many people are visiting your site and what they’re doing when they get there, it’s very hard to make good decisions about where to invest time and effort.
Q: We’ve got a global conference in two weeks and haven’t sold enough places. What can we do with such a short runway?
Two weeks is tight, but not hopeless – it just changes what’s realistic. The most important thing at this stage is to focus on the audience you already have rather than trying to find new people from scratch. Anyone who’s attended before, anyone on your mailing list, anyone who’s engaged with you on LinkedIn – these are the people most likely to say yes quickly because they already know who you are and what you offer.
A sequence of two or three targeted emails over the next fortnight – getting more specific and urgent as the date approaches – is probably your best short-term lever. A last-minute discount in the final few days can help shift hesitant buyers if you’ve still got places to fill.
On the conference landing page itself, a few things came up that are worth addressing even with limited time. The year wasn’t prominently displayed – always make the date feel immediate and current. The price wasn’t visible without scrolling – people shouldn’t have to hunt for it. And it wasn’t immediately clear whether the event was online or in person – the imagery implied one thing and the title said another. Clarity on all of these reduces friction for people who are on the fence.
Longer term – and this doesn’t help for this conference but will matter for the next one – the conference page should ideally stay live all year as a way of capturing interest and building your list. A simple “register your interest for next year” form keeps the momentum going and means you’re not starting from zero every time.
Q: We’ve been approved for Google Ad Grants but we’re worried about losing the funding if we don’t get enough clicks. Should we just go for it?
Yes, with a bit of care. The Google Ad Grant does have requirements around click-through rates and account activity, but it’s very unlikely to be switched off without warning – Google tends to give you a chance to fix things before pulling the plug. And if you’re not spending the grant, you’re not getting the benefit of it, so there’s a real cost to sitting on it indefinitely.
The bigger practical challenge is targeting. Google Ads works best when people are actively searching for what you offer. If your work is very specific or uses niche terminology, you need to think carefully about what terms your audience would actually type into a search engine – and those might be different from how you describe yourselves internally. Getting the keyword strategy right is the part that takes the most thought, and it’s worth getting some guidance on that if you can. We know people who specialise in Google Ads for charities and are happy to make introductions.
The broader thread: inward-facing language
Something that came up more than once in this session – and it’s a pattern we see constantly – is organisations using language that makes complete sense internally but means very little to someone encountering them for the first time. Mission statements full of sector jargon. Taglines that only resonate if you already know what the organisation does. Conference descriptions that bury the “who is this for?” question halfway down the page.
The fix is simple in principle but surprisingly hard in practice: get someone outside the organisation to read your website, your LinkedIn profile, your conference page, and tell you honestly what they do and don’t understand. If it doesn’t make sense to them, it won’t make sense to a funder, a donor, or a potential member either. A good book on this if you want to go deeper is Great Fundraising Organizations by Alan Clayton – it deals specifically with how charities can shift from inward-facing to outward-facing communication.
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.