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 covered a lot of familiar ground – but was interesting nonetheless, writes Matt Saunders. We had a solo fundraiser from an NHS charity, a part-time comms officer juggling multiple responsibilities, a governance lead from a large network organisation, someone brand new to the charity sector rebuilding a digital presence from scratch, and a fundraiser new to the sector listening in. Three big themes emerged: social media with no time, AI ethics and policy, and what to do when your organisation has grown faster than its governance. Here’s what came out of it.
Q: I’m a solo fundraiser trying to grow our social media channels. I have almost no time and zero budget. Where do I start?
This is the question we get in almost every session, and the honest answer is that there’s no shortcut – but there are things that make it more manageable.
The first is consistency over volume. Posting sporadically when you get a spare ten minutes is less effective than posting less frequently but reliably. One thoughtful post a week, scheduled in advance, beats three rushed posts that go out at random times. Social media content is transient – it usually gets buried within a day – so showing up regularly matters more than showing up perfectly.
The second is time blocking. It sounds obvious, but putting social media time in your calendar as a fixed, non-negotiable appointment – even just 15 minutes – is the only reliable way to protect it from the constant stream of other demands. The more consistently you do it, the faster you get at it. It becomes a habit rather than a chore.
The third is planning ahead rather than reacting. Mental Health Awareness Week, Christmas, Giving Tuesday, awareness days relevant to your cause – these are all predictable. If you know they’re coming, you can draft content in advance during a quieter period rather than scrambling when the moment arrives. Even a simple content calendar with one or two things sketched out a month ahead makes a significant difference.
And on AI: if you’re spending time writing every post from scratch, there’s an obvious opportunity to use AI to speed that up. Feed it examples of your existing content and your tone of voice, and ask it to draft something in a similar style. You’ll still need to tweak it – but starting from a draft is much faster than starting from nothing.
Q: We want to use AI tools but we’re worried about getting the ethics right. How do we use it appropriately without overstepping?
This came up from someone whose organisation had just purchased a paid AI subscription and was trying to work out how to use it responsibly – and it prompted one of the richer conversations of the session.
A few things are worth separating out here. The first is data privacy. On free AI accounts, your inputs can be used to train the model or shared in other ways – which can create a GDPR problem if you’re putting in any personal or sensitive data. Paid accounts on platforms like Claude or ChatGPT Plus offer private data handling, and Microsoft Copilot tied to an existing organisational licence is generally considered safe within that environment. The rule of thumb: check the data policy of any AI tool before you put anything sensitive into it. If in doubt, don’t.
The second is accuracy. AI tools will confidently produce things that are wrong – statistics, references, facts. If you’re using AI to help write anything that will be published or shared externally, verify anything that could be checked. This isn’t optional.
AI tools will confidently produce things that are wrong - statistics, references, facts. If you're using AI to help write anything that will be published or shared externally, verify anything that could be checked.
The third is the ethics of AI-generated content more broadly – particularly images. Using AI image generation raises questions about whether you’re drawing on the work of artists who haven’t consented to their work being used as training data. There’s no universally right answer, but it’s worth your organisation having a position on it rather than leaving individuals to decide for themselves.
The most practical piece of advice that came out of the session: once you have an AI policy agreed by your board, upload it into your AI tool as a set of instructions. In Claude, you can do this at the project level, so every conversation within that project automatically references the policy. It won’t replace human judgement, but it gives the tool guardrails and reduces the cognitive load of having to remember the rules every time you use it.
Q: Our organisation has grown quickly and our social media is now a governance problem. Volunteers are running dozens of local accounts and the messaging is inconsistent. How do we get a handle on it without upsetting people?
This came from an organisation that started small and grew to hundreds of staff and volunteers across the UK – with local peer support groups running their own Facebook and Instagram pages, often set up years ago by well-meaning volunteers with no shared guidelines. Now that social media has come into scope for their cyber essentials accreditation, the question of governance has become urgent.
A few things came out of the conversation. The first step is simply knowing what you’ve got – mapping all the accounts that exist, who controls them, and how they’re being used. You can’t manage what you haven’t identified. This is the kind of audit that needs to happen before anything else.
The second is the access problem. If the administrator of a local account leaves, and the account is tied to their personal login, access can be lost permanently. This has happened to countless charities, we see it often. All accounts should be linked to a shared or organisational credential, not an individual’s personal one, and that transition needs to happen proactively rather than after someone leaves.
The third is guidance rather than control. The instinct when things feel chaotic is to centralise and lock things down – but volunteers who’ve been running local accounts for years will feel that as a loss of autonomy and trust. The more effective approach is to create clear, simple guidance on what’s appropriate and what isn’t, frame it as protecting the organisation rather than policing individuals, and give people the tools to make good decisions rather than taking decisions away from them. The word “guidance” tends to land better than “policy.”
The instinct when things feel chaotic is to centralise and lock things down - but volunteers who've been running local accounts for years will feel that as a loss of autonomy and trust
One specific example that came up: when a national news event happens that touches on the organisation’s cause area, local volunteers may want to respond publicly on social media. Having clear guidance that says “here’s how we think about what’s in scope for us to comment on, and here’s what isn’t” – agreed at board level and shared widely – can prevent a lot of well-intentioned but potentially damaging posts.
The broader principle: the more your organisation grows, the more the absence of governance becomes a risk rather than just an inconvenience. Better to build the scaffolding proactively than to spend twice the time firefighting when something goes wrong.
Q: I’ve just joined a charity that has almost no policies, no social media presence, and no digital footprint. Where do I even begin?
This came from someone who described themselves as having put out the biggest fires and now trying to tackle the smaller ones. It’s a situation more people are in than you might think – inheriting a digital vacuum and having to build from scratch with no budget and no roadmap.
On finding policy templates: you don’t need to write everything from scratch. Several good free resources came up in the session. Charity Excellence Framework has a wide range of free templates and some useful free AI training. The Charity Commission website has guidance on governance requirements. Larger charities often publish their own policies openly on their websites – it’s entirely reasonable to use these as a starting point and adapt them for your context. And AI itself is also useful here: ask it to draft a policy, compare it to what you find elsewhere, and use a human (or a lawyer if it’s high stakes) to review the output.
The most important thing is not to try to do everything at once. Work out what’s most urgent – usually data protection, safeguarding if relevant, and any policies required for funding or accreditation – and start there. Everything else can follow.
The thread running through everything: prioritisation
More than any specific topic, what kept surfacing in this session was the challenge of prioritisation.
Many people in the charity space are carrying too much. Solo fundraisers fielding daily staff queries while trying to build a social media presence. Part-time comms officers navigating AI policy, governance questions, and content creation simultaneously. Governance leads trying to introduce change carefully without overwhelming people who are already stretched.
The answer that emerged is that prioritisation is a discipline to cultivate. It means actively deciding what not to do, at least for now. It means protecting time in your calendar for the things that matter strategically, not just the things that shout loudest on any given day. And it means being willing to say clearly – to colleagues, to boards, to committees – “this is what I can do with the resource I have, and this is what will have to wait.”
We get it, that’s an uncomfortable conversation to have. But the alternative – trying to do everything at once and doing none of it well – is worse! The organisations that tend to make real progress are the ones that pick two or three things and go deep on them, rather than spreading thin across everything.
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.