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 had a smaller but really engaged room, writes Matt Saunders. We had people from a sight loss charity, a digital safety social enterprise, a Citizens Advice office, and a chronic pain charity – all facing versions of the same core challenge: how do you reach the people who need you most, when your team is small, your time is limited, and the digital landscape feels noisier than ever? Here’s what came out of the conversation.
Q: How do we stand out from the noise and get our message to a bigger audience?
This came up early and it’s one of the most common questions we hear. The honest first response is to gently challenge the word “bigger.” A bigger audience isn’t always the right goal – a more relevant audience almost always is. If you’re reaching people who have no real connection to your cause, you’re not just failing to engage them, you’re adding to the noise for them too. It’s worth asking: who is the person most likely to care about what we do, and where do they already exist?
The second thing worth sitting with is what your message actually is. Not what your organisation does – but the single core thing you want someone to feel or understand. If that’s clear and resonant, it will travel. If it isn’t, no amount of reach will compensate.
One particularly interesting thread in this session was the challenge of reaching audiences who are hard to reach by digital means – older people, people without smartphones, people who don’t use email. The instinct is often to double down on digital, but it’s worth remembering that referral networks, local partnerships, and word of mouth still work. Some of the most effective charities we’ve encountered don’t do much marketing at all – they grow entirely through referrals from NHS services, local authorities, and partner organisations. A solid website that demonstrates your authority and credibility can be enough to support that, without needing a full digital marketing operation behind it.
Q: We have multiple audiences – service users, carers, funders, corporate partners. How do we speak to all of them?
The short answer is: you probably can’t do all of them well at the same time, especially with a small team. And trying to speak to everyone often means you end up connecting with no one.
What we’d suggest is doing an honest internal exercise to ask: who do we most need to reach right now, and what do we need from them? That prioritisation shapes everything – your messaging, your channels, your content. Once you’ve nailed one audience, you can build outward from there.
It’s also worth noting that audiences aren’t always as distinct as they first appear. A corporate partner choosing to support your cause is almost always being driven by someone inside that organisation with a personal connection to it. A funder is often motivated by a story rather than a statistic. So the emotional thread that runs through your supporter communications is often the same one that works with funders and partners too – just expressed differently.
Q: How do we go about building audience personas, and where do we start if we’ve never done it before?
This came up in relation to social media, but it applies across everything. Persona development is just the process of getting really clear on who you’re talking to – their motivations, their pain points, where they spend time, how they found you, what would move them to act.
There’s no single right way to do it, but the most valuable source of information is almost always direct conversation. Talking to existing supporters, service users, or volunteers – even a handful of people for half an hour each – will tell you more than any analytics dashboard. Ask them why they got involved, what they were looking for, what made them stay. The patterns that emerge from those conversations are the raw material for your personas.
On top of that, internal workshops with your own team can surface a lot – especially people who are on the frontline and hear directly from service users day to day. Analytics can add demographic texture, but be careful not to over-index on it – demographics can mislead you as often as they help.
One practical tip: once you’ve built a persona, print it out and put it somewhere visible. Every time you write a post, a newsletter, a funding application – ask yourself whether what you’re saying is genuinely speaking to that person. It sounds simple, but it’s one of the most effective things you can do.
There are also AI-powered tools emerging that can help with this if you already have data. One worth looking at is Pravy, which can pull in data from your CRM, mailing list, and donor records to help surface potential audience segments. We haven’t used it ourselves yet but it looks promising for organisations that already have some data to work with.
Q: We’re building a virtual resource hub for our community. Any tips on making it engaging?
The best tip we could offer here is: involve your existing community in shaping it before it’s built. If you already have people coming to your events and workshops, you have a ready-made group to ask. A simple survey or a few informal conversations – what would you want to find here, what would make you come back – can give your developer a much clearer brief than any amount of internal planning.
The goal of any community platform is stickiness – giving people a reason to return. That comes from content that’s genuinely useful, a sense that the space is active, and an experience that feels designed for the people using it rather than for the organisation running it. Building it with your community rather than for them is the surest way to get that right.
Circle (circle.so) is a platform worth looking at for community building if you’re still exploring options – it has a lot of thoughtful UX built into it that you can take cues from.
The thread running through everything
Every conversation in this session came back to the same place: clarity on who you’re trying to reach, before anything else. The organisations in the room were all doing genuinely important work – supporting people with sight loss to live independently, tackling online hate and cyber bullying, helping chronic pain sufferers and their families, supporting people navigating complex systems. That work deserves to be seen. But the way it gets seen isn’t by shouting louder – it’s by knowing exactly who needs to hear it, and meeting them where they already are.
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.