Small charities are at risk of drowning in overblown marketing advice. Many of them comprise just three or four staff, and often none of those will be trained or experienced marketers. The practices of big charities won’t work for them.
Sadly, a good deal of the support out there (once you’ve navigated the oceans of clickbait) assumes way too much of them and is overly complex. All they really need to hear is to be clear about what they are trying to achieve – and given support in achieving that with the resources they have. Anything more is a distraction for them right now, and they can learn it as they grow.
80% of UK charities are defined as ‘small’ by NCVO, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. That is, they have an annual income of under £100,000. And the majority of those – 69% of them (47% of all UK charities) – are ‘micro’, meaning they have an annual income of under £10,000.
Therefore, a lot of small charities cannot afford much in the way of marketing and so the delegated staff member has to do most of it themselves. Their role can become a hands-on catch-all for strategy and planning, content writing, content creation, graphic design, web design, media relations, data management, asset management, events management – you name it. These hapless souls are often untrained, have inadequate hours to commit to the role and little or no budget.
I desperately needed help in learning, navigating and prioritising it all when I was in that position. But what I really, really did not need was to be left feeling even more inadequate and overwhelmed than I was already. I did not need to drown in gallons of ‘top tips’ clickbait by ‘experts’, nor torrents of LinkedIn newsletters that told me how good the authors were at their jobs and therefore how crap I must have been at my own.
And I did not need to waste my time in training sessions ‘for small charities’ in which marketers from large charities spouted advice that I had no hope of heeding.
Unfortunately, that was predominantly my experience. I remember one seminar in particular that left me feeling overwhelmed and wholly inadequate, despite it being specifically about marketing for small charities. One of the very first comments was, ‘Of course, no-one uses AVE any more’. Well I wouldn’t know, I’d never heard of it. One or two people chuckled knowingly, but the rest of the room seemed as sheepishly silent as I was. The speaker’s grasp of our situation was so slight they assumed knowledge that we were never going to have.
Then a man from a large conservation charity told us to try out some tools. ‘This one,’ he said, waving at the presentation behind him, ‘only costs four hundred pounds a month’. How much?! None of us had that kind of money; I had little more than that in my entire budget for the year. Remember I told you nearly 70% of small charities in the UK have an annual income of under £10,000? That tool alone would consume at least around half of such an organisation’s entire annual budget. What planet was that man on?!
We were also told of a new planning methodology that we should be using (the fashion for these seems to change with the wind). ‘It will take you about three months to set this up,’ the speaker said. Great, I thought: find me a parallel universe to waste time in and I might give it a try.
The whole event was ill-conceived. The speakers didn’t really understand the landscape of small charity marketing and communications; they came from medium or large charities in which they had the freedom, authority and resources to plan ahead in detail, make decisions and spend money – and they presumed we must have that too.
In reality, many of us were in organisations that put marketing and communications low in their priorities – because the work they were actually funded to do had to come first, or (as was too often the case) because the management didn’t recognise the value of it. I myself had been part of a small team in a charity of around 30 people until a new CEO had come along with cuts to make, and suddenly I was the only member of staff with an explicit communications or marketing role.
That seminar was a while ago, but sadly its lack of understanding about small charities persists. I was recently putting together a pitch for training local community groups, so I took a look at what the ‘experts’ were offering. I found this presentation for a Directory of Social Change training day: Marketing and Communications Skills for Small Charities. It is 94 slides long and I was already lost by slide nine.
Slide 10 tries to put our minds at ease with the slogan ‘Keep Calm and Get Back to Basics’, but then it plunges into another 84 slides of what is essentially a course in marketing theory. It tells us that the ‘Four Ps of Marketing’ (the what?) have grown to seven; that we should be doing PEST and SWOT analyses and scrutinising our competitors; that we must write detailed business plans, marketing plans and communications plans; that we need to identify milestones, success criteria and evaluation models; that we must develop our USP and segment our audience; it even makes us responsible for advising our employers on aspects of tax and law.
That may be all very well for the UK’s handful of medium and large charities – like, say, The Directory of Social Change – but not, I would argue, for the other 80%, 70% of which bring in less than £10,000 a year and often have staff numbers in single figures.
As sole marketers with no training and little or no budget, we have to become at least semi-skilled in lots of different disciplines and do most of the work ourselves – which, of course, is impossible to do well. We are therefore hungry for tools and advice to help us, but only if they are suitable and realistic.
Small charities need realistic, actionable support that starts where they are, not where some ‘expert’ thinks they should be. Their success doesn’t lie in mastering the latest buzzwords or frameworks. It lies in identifying clear goals and making the best use of the resources they have already. Let’s stop overwhelming them with what doesn’t matter and start empowering them with what does.
If the sector really wants to support small charities, it needs to stop drowning them in overblown marketing advice. It’s time to ditch the 94-slide presentations, the £400-a-month tools, and the out-of-touch guidance. Instead, let’s focus on offering practical, empathetic guidance that acknowledges their realities and helps them thrive – one achievable step at a time.
If you’re drowning in marketing advice…
…and would welcome help narrowing down the immediate marketing priorities for your small charity or community group, do get in touch. I will focus only on what you need to achieve and what you have available in terms of time and resources. I can also help deliver some of the work if needed.
