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 one – just three attendees – which meant we could go deeper than usual, writes Matt Saunders. We had a friends group for a historic rural church, a domestic abuse charity, and a trustee from a survivors’ support group. Two quite different conversations emerged: one about making the most of a unique community venue with limited resource, and one about social media strategy for an organisation working in a sensitive cause area. Here’s what came out of it.
Q: We run a small friends group for a historic church. We want to expand our reach and awareness but we’re a tiny team with limited time. Where do we focus?
This is a situation a lot of community organisations will recognise – a meaningful local asset, a small and passionate volunteer committee, and not much bandwidth for anything beyond the day-to-day.
A few things came out of the conversation. The first is to lean into what makes the place genuinely unique rather than trying to compete with similar local organisations doing similar things. A church with no electricity, no heating, and no running water isn’t a liability – it’s a story. Wrap up warm, bring a flask, stargazing nights, candlelit concerts, champing (camping inside churches) – these are experiences people can’t get anywhere else, and that’s the thing worth putting at the centre of your social media content.
On Facebook specifically, the page doesn’t need to be constantly active to be effective – but it does need to be consistent. Rather than posting reactively when there’s an event to promote, think in advance about what regular content could look like: a weekly feature on a gravestone or stained glass window, a short video of the churchyard, a post about the history of a particular architectural detail. Sitting down once a month and scheduling a few posts removes the pressure of having to come up with something on the day.
Asking your audience what they’d like to use the space for is a perfectly reasonable thing to do on social media – it’s public engagement, and it gives you useful information while also signalling that you’re community-facing rather than just fundraising-focused.
For events, the build-up matters as much as the announcement. Rather than posting once when tickets go on sale, break the story into pieces: why you’re doing this event, who it’s for, what people will experience, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of preparation. By the time you make the final push, people have already had several reasons to pay attention.
Targeted Facebook ads can work well for a local organisation because you can focus your spend tightly on people in the surrounding area. Even a small amount of budget behind a well-chosen image – candlelit, atmospheric, unmistakably unique – can bring new people to the page who would never have found you otherwise.
And on measurement: you’re already doing something really useful by asking event attendees how they heard about you. Keeping track of that over time, and being honest about which channels are actually driving people through the door, will help you make better decisions about where to put your limited time.
Q: We work in a sensitive cause area and have to be careful about what we post. How do we keep our social media fresh and relevant without jumping on trends that feel forced or inappropriate?
This is a real tension for organisations working in areas like domestic abuse, sexual violence, or mental health. The instinct to stay current by riding national awareness days or trending topics can easily tip into something that feels flippant or performative – and your audience will notice.
A few principles came out of the discussion. The first is to be selective rather than comprehensive. There are hundreds of awareness days – you don’t need to mark all of them, and trying to do so produces content that feels mechanical. Stick to the ones that genuinely connect to your work and where you have something real to add. If the link feels tenuous, it probably is.
The second is to think about what you can give rather than what you can say. An organisation that helps people understand whether a friend or family member might be in an abusive relationship – and what to do if they suspect they are – is offering something genuinely valuable. That kind of guide or resource is shareable, drives traffic back to your website, and builds trust in a way that a broadcast post rarely does.
The third is to analyse your own history. Looking back across a full year of posts – rather than month by month – and grouping them by type (fundraising, awareness, service announcements, stories, resources) can reveal patterns that aren’t visible in the day-to-day. Which types consistently get more reach? Which channels behave differently from each other? If you can export your post data and upload it to an AI tool, it can surface trends and help you understand what’s working and why – saving a lot of guesswork.
The broader point on trends: rather than asking “what’s trending that we could link to?”, it’s often more useful to ask “what would our audience find genuinely useful or moving right now?” Those two questions sometimes produce the same answer. But the second one is more likely to produce content that feels authentic rather than forced.
A side note on annual reports
This came up briefly but is worth a mention. If you’re still printing large quantities of annual reports, it’s worth reconsidering. Moving to a primarily digital format – a PDF sent by email, with a link on your website – saves significant cost and actually gives you more insight: digital readers let you see which pages people spend time on, which sections get skipped, and how many people open it at all. A small number of printed copies for funders who request them is usually sufficient. The money saved is better spent almost anywhere else.
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.