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 another good one, writes Matt Saunders. We had a really varied room – from a black-led dance and carnival charity to a nursing studies foundation, a youth zone, a children’s farm charity, a learning disability charity, and a new cricket foundation, among others. Small teams, big workloads, and a lot of the same underlying challenges showing up in very different contexts. Here’s what came out of the conversation.
Q: We’re at the point of choosing a booking platform for our new website. We use Stripe for payments. How do we pick the right one?
The most important thing we’d say here is: before you look at any platform, get clear on your requirements first. Does it need to send automated reminders? Booking confirmations? Does it need to talk to your CRM? Does it need to handle free bookings as well as paid ones? Until you know the answers to those questions, you risk choosing something that looks right and turns out not to be.
A few options came up in the room. Ticket Tailor offers a 50% discount for charities and integrates with Stripe. Eventbrite can export data into a CRM and has an embeddable widget for your website. Gravity Forms (a WordPress plugin) is a flexible option that works well with Stripe and lets you build bespoke forms for different events. And for simpler needs, Google Forms can work as a no-cost starting point.
The broader point is worth repeating: the technology isn’t usually the hard part. It’s stringing the pieces together – booking platform, payment processor, CRM, confirmation emails – and making sure the user journey holds together end to end. Think through the whole flow before you commit to any one tool (we did this extensively for Abortion Talk). And as a general rule, it’s always worth asking any software provider directly for a charity discount or extended trial, even if it’s not advertised. As someone in the room put it: shy bairns get nowt.
Q: I can’t find a single piece of software that handles CRM, monitoring, and evaluation reporting all in one. Does it exist?
Honestly – probably not in the way you’re hoping. We’d be cautious of any tool that claims to do everything, because in our experience the all-in-one solutions tend to do most things adequately and few things really well.
What tends to work better is a layered approach: use the best tool for each job (a CRM like HubSpot or Beacon, a newsletter platform like Mailchimp, whatever works for reporting) and then use a dashboard tool on top to pull the data together into a single view. It can be more technically involved to set up, but it gives you far more flexibility and tends to serve you better in the long run.
Q: We’re trying to recruit trustees with specific skills – safeguarding, finance – and we’re not sure where to look beyond social media.
Reach Volunteering is the go-to platform for trustee recruitment and well worth starting there. It’s specifically designed for this kind of role and tends to attract people who are actively looking to give their time and expertise to a cause.
Beyond that, don’t underestimate your existing supporter base. People who already know and care about your work are often the best candidates – they’ve already bought into the mission. Having a clear, well-structured role description matters a lot here too. Vague listings put people off. If you know you need someone with a finance background, say so clearly and explain what the commitment looks like in practice.
Canva has trustee recruitment pack templates worth looking at, and if you’ve got a mailing list, putting it out there to your existing community is a natural first step.
Q: We’ve been putting out social media posts for a community fundraising campaign and getting almost no engagement. Nobody’s signed up. What are we doing wrong?
It’s one of the most common things we hear. The honest answer is that low engagement on social media is rarely just a social media problem – it’s usually a sign that one of a few things isn’t quite right.
The first is timing. Social media campaigns need runway. If you’re launching a campaign with a few weeks’ notice, you’re already at a disadvantage. The charities that tend to get the best results plan months ahead, build awareness gradually, and then amplify at the right moment.
The second is audience clarity. Before you decide what to post or where, it’s worth asking: who is the one person most likely to fundraise for us, and why would they? Not your service users – your supporters. What do they have in common? How did they find you? What would motivate them to sign up for a 5k on your behalf? If you can’t answer those questions, the message will feel generic and won’t land.
The third is over-reliance on organic social. Organic reach is declining across every platform and it’s only going to get harder. Social media is best used as a tool for bringing people into your world – getting them onto a mailing list, onto your website, into a relationship with you – rather than as a direct ask channel. Once you’ve got people in your world and you’ve nurtured that relationship over time, the ask feels different.
Email is consistently more effective than social for this kind of campaign, and building that list should be a priority for most organisations that aren’t already doing it.
Q: Is anyone else struggling with social media engagement generally? We left Twitter/X but our Blue Sky presence isn’t taking off.
This resonated with almost everyone in the room. The honest answer is that there’s a real fatigue with social media right now – both from organisations managing it and from audiences consuming it. The platforms are overcrowded, algorithms are increasingly working against organic content, and managing multiple channels on a limited team is exhausting.
A few things came out of the discussion. Streamlining is often the right move – doing fewer channels well is better than spreading thin across many. LinkedIn tends to work well for reaching corporate and professional audiences. Facebook and Instagram cover most general supporter audiences. TikTok can work well for younger demographics but only if you’ve got the internal capacity to generate the kind of content it rewards – video, ideally shot by people close to the work.
And for organisations that represent vulnerable people or young people, the values question around X is a real one. A number of organisations in the room had stepped away from it for exactly that reason, and that’s a legitimate call to make.
The bigger thread running through everything
Almost every question in this session came back to the same underlying theme: knowing your audience before you choose your channel or your tool. Whether it’s picking a booking platform, planning a fundraising campaign, or deciding where to invest your limited social media time – the answer almost always starts with getting clear on who you’re trying to reach and what they need from you. If that foundation isn’t there, even the best tools and the most well-intentioned campaigns tend to fall flat.
Marketing is a pyramid, and the bottom layer is audience understanding. Everything else sits on top of that.
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.