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 great mix in the room, writes Matt Saunders. We had people from a carers support charity, a learning disability charity, and a Google Ads specialist who works exclusively with nonprofits – which meant the conversation ranged from very practical platform questions right through to some bigger strategic threads around traffic, attribution, and list building. Here’s what came out of it.
Q: I’m new to social media management and I’m trying to connect Instagram to Hootsuite – but I’m hitting a wall. Is it still possible?
Yes – but your Instagram account needs to be set up as a business profile rather than a personal one. You can change this in your account settings; it’s straightforward and just requires adding some basic organisation information. Once it’s a business profile, connecting it to Hootsuite should work without issue.
This also came with a broader reminder that’s worth flagging for anyone setting up social accounts for an organisation: always link them to a dedicated account rather than a personal one. It’s one of the most common problems we see – someone sets up a page using their personal login, then leaves the organisation, and access is lost. Even with the best intentions, handovers get messy. Set it up cleanly from the start and you’ll save yourself a lot of pain later.
Q: We want to increase our website traffic and grow our social media following – but nothing seems to be moving. Where do we start?
Before jumping to tactics, the most useful question to ask is: what do you actually want traffic and followers to do? If the answer is “donate” or “volunteer” or “sign up for a service” – then the goal isn’t really more traffic, it’s more conversions. And those are very different problems.
Once you’re clear on the action you want people to take, you can start tracking whether your current traffic is actually delivering it. If you’re getting visits but no conversions, more traffic won’t help – the issue is likely something about the website experience or the messaging. If you’re converting well but just at low volume, then yes, growing traffic becomes the priority.
On the question of tracking more broadly: it’s worth being honest about the limitations here. Analytics tools are increasingly unreliable – consent issues, Apple device tracking gaps, and the rise of AI-driven search all mean the data you’re looking at is almost certainly undercounting reality. Rather than obsessing over exact numbers, look at trends and focus on the conversion actions that matter most to you. Is the number going up or down? That’s usually enough to work with.
Q: We’re seeing referrals from ChatGPT in our analytics – including some significant donations from people who’d never heard of us before. How does that work, and can we encourage more of it?
This came up from someone in the room who works with nonprofits on Google Ads, and it prompted a really interesting conversation. The short answer is that LLMs like ChatGPT are doing web searches on your behalf when you ask them a question – pulling from sources they consider authoritative and relevant. How they rank and surface organisations isn’t fully transparent, but the emerging consensus is that it follows similar principles to traditional SEO: authority, relevance, and how much credible noise you’re making about your work.
The practical implication is actually quite encouraging for charities: good old-fashioned marketing still works. Getting out into your community, running events, getting mentioned on partners’ websites, speaking at things, being quoted in local press – all of this builds the kind of presence that search engines and LLMs recognise as authoritative. If anything, the rise of AI search is a reason to invest in those fundamentals rather than to chase algorithmic tricks.
And when something significant happens – like a cold donation from someone who found you through ChatGPT – that’s a research opportunity. If the donor is willing, ask them how they found you, what they were searching for, and what made them choose you. That kind of first-hand insight is worth more than any analytics report.
Q: Should we be using AI tools like ChatGPT for grant writing?
Using AI to polish, tighten, and format grant applications – fitting content within word counts, improving clarity, sense-checking structure – is a very sensible use of the technology. The approach that came up in the session felt exactly right: write the application yourself first, then use AI to refine it. The knowledge and the case for your work needs to come from you; the AI is just a sophisticated editor.
For anyone doing a lot of bid writing, it’s also worth looking at dedicated platforms built specifically for this purpose. There are tools emerging that combine AI writing assistance with pipeline tracking and funder research – designed specifically for the charity sector. It’s a fast-moving space and worth keeping an eye on.
Q: We’re putting a lot of effort into social media but getting very little back in terms of actual engagement. Is it worth it?
This came up in the context of asking for volunteers and donations specifically – posts that require action rather than just a reaction. The honest answer is that organic social is increasingly a poor channel for this, and it’s getting harder rather than easier. Algorithms actively deprioritise content that isn’t paid for, and audiences have shifted towards passive consumption rather than active engagement.
That doesn’t mean abandoning social altogether. But it does mean being clearer about what you’re using it for. Social is good for awareness – getting people to know you exist, building a sense of who you are and what you stand for. The conversion – the volunteer signup, the donation, the event registration – almost always happens somewhere else.
Which brings us to the thing that came up again and again in this session.
The middle ground most organisations are missing: list building
There’s a gap that a lot of charities fall into. On one side you’ve got social media – an audience of people who know you exist but haven’t really opted in to a relationship with you. On the other side you’ve got your existing donors, volunteers, and service users – people who are already engaged. In between is a huge group of people who’ve shown some interest but haven’t yet committed in any meaningful way.
Building that middle group – through a mailing list, a CRM, any kind of opt-in – is one of the highest-leverage things most organisations can do. Events are a perfect opportunity: instead of just showing up and hoping people remember you, ask if you can take their details. Not to ask for money – just to stay in touch. And then actually stay in touch, with things that are worth their time.
Email consistently outperforms social media for driving action. It’s a channel you own. And when someone on your list is ready to donate or volunteer, you’re not competing with an algorithm – you’re in their inbox, with their permission, because they chose to be there. That’s a very different relationship from a follower on Instagram.
The caveat is: only commit to an email programme you can actually sustain. Promising regular newsletters and then going quiet is worse than not starting. Pick a frequency that’s realistic, make sure what you’re sending gives people something of value, and build from there.
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.