Charity Comm's Greatest Hits and How to Actually Fix Them

It starts quietly. A tweet that sounds like it was generated by a toaster. A mission statement full of "impact" and "empowerment" that could describe either a refugee charity or a start-up selling ergonomic staplers. Then the website—beautifully designed, but mysteriously silent on what the charity does, exactly.

These are not outliers. They're greatest hits—classic, reliable, and painfully avoidable missteps that stalk the communications output of even the most well-meaning charities. Let's shine a slightly-too-harsh LED torch on six of the most recurring offenders—and then, in a shock twist, fix them.

1. Brand Expression That Might As Well Be Smoke

If your charity's brand voice is described internally as "professional but friendly," you are not alone. You are, however, in trouble. Most charity comms teams inherit tone guidelines that sound like a vague horoscope for Virgo risings.

The fix? Give your brand a spinal column. Choose a reference point—if your brand were a person, would it be the candid friend who swears a bit but always shows up, or the meticulous librarian who catalogues trauma with empathy? You don't have to turn everything into performance poetry, but your copy shouldn't sound like it was written by a mid-level manager at an insurance firm on their lunch break.

Define three concrete adjectives, ban the ones that apply to every charity ever ("caring," "compassionate," "impactful") and test everything against your revised tone spine.

2. Strategy That Exists Solely as a Google Doc Named "Final FINAL Strategy v9"

This one is popular. The strategy that exists in theory, buried under several meetings" worth of well-intentioned ambition and half-baked PowerPoint decks. You know the one—it references "audiences" and "channels" but never makes you feel anything except the slow crawl of existential malaise.

A comms strategy must answer three things quickly:

• What exactly are we trying to achieve?
• Who needs to care?
• What's the least amount of noise we can make to get their attention?

And yes, *least*. More is not better. Strategy is about subtraction. Focus beats reach. Choose your messages like you're on a desert island and only allowed to shout three sentences through a megaphone once a week.

3. Digital Fundraising Scattered Like Confetti in a Hurricane

You're scrolling. One donation form is a standalone island, unreachable from the main site. Another campaign is hosted on a third-party site with a colour scheme suggesting a toddler chose it. Then there's the Instagram post with a dead link. A classic.

Consistency is not glamorous, but it gets donations. That means one user journey. One branded donation process. One voice. Think of your fundraising ecosystem as a nervous cat: startle it with an unexpected landing page or a new tone, and it will vanish, taking the donor with it.

You don't need twelve campaigns. You need one or two that are sticky, direct, and emotionally legible within two seconds. And please: "Help us make a difference" is a phrase so hollow it may as well echo.

4. SEO That's More Like SOS

It's not that charity comms people don't care about SEO. It's that they'd rather wrestle a live goose than figure out why their blog post about "community-led impact stories" is ranking below an obscure Lithuanian jam recipe.

The issue is usually twofold: writing for internal approval rather than user intent, and assuming Google understands metaphors. It doesn't. Google is many things, but poetic is not one of them.

Fixing this isn't dark magic. It just requires speaking plainly. If your charity helps ex-prisoners find housing, then use those words. Not "reintegrative pathways for marginalised service users." Run your titles through an incognito Google search—would you click on them if you weren't you? If not, you've buried your lede six feet under jargon.

Also: structure matters. Subheadings, meta descriptions, internal links. These are the equivalent of leaving the light on for your guests rather than making them fumble through the hallway in the dark. Don't punish curiosity. Reward it.

5. Data That Sits Quietly in a Spreadsheet Whispering "Why Do You Ignore Me?"

You have it. Rows and rows. Open rates, bounce rates, click-throughs. Perhaps even sentiment analysis. But here's the kicker: it's only ever looked at in performance reviews, used to bludgeon a campaign into submission or defend its noble death.

Data is not a weapon, nor is it a threat. It's just a nervous system. Use it regularly, and it becomes your intuition. Use it quarterly, and it becomes courtroom evidence.

The fix here is cultural. Normalize talking about what didn't work, without shame. Make space in team meetings for "one surprising stat." Create dashboards that show movement, not paralysis. Better a rough insight today than a perfect graph no one reads in six months.

6. Internal Comms That Would Make Kafka Weep

Ah yes, the mystery email from "engagement@ourcharity.org" that was apparently a critical internal update. Or the 57-slide all-staff deck containing only three slides of relevance to you. This is how morale isn't murdered—it simply wanders off and stops texting back.

Internal comms is often the last thing anyone budgets for, and the first thing that breaks when pace picks up. But if your own team doesn't know what's happening, why it matters, or who's doing what, your external messaging will fray like a cheap ribbon.

Do less, better. Use Slack, Teams, or whatever other corporate shrine you pray to, but use it with intent. A weekly digest, an update from leadership that feels written by an actual human, a short video no one dreads watching. None of this requires a brand refresh. It just requires respect for your audience, even if they share your payroll.

Mic Drop, Not White Flag

Fixing these comms classics isn't about revolution. It's about refusal—refusing to let vague language, buried data, or erratic fundraising undercut the work your organisation does. You're not here to fill space. You're here to shift something. A perception, a policy, a person's day. That deserves clarity. And just a touch of flair.

If nothing else, let this be the year your donation page makes sense, your mission is written in something approaching English, and your brand tone isn't a mild-mannered ghost in beige slacks. We believe in you. But more importantly: let's make sure your audience does, too.

Article kindly provided by equalthings.com