Small charities, CICs and other organisations with limited communications capacity usually have more marketing opportunities than they have time to pursue. Social media. Email. Website content. Events. Campaigns. Search. Partnerships. The harder decision is which of those activities actually deserves your attention. A useful starting point is: Audience > Goal > Capacity. Who do you most need to reach? What do you need to achieve? What can your team realistically keep doing well?
Choose marketing priorities where an important audience, a clear organisational goal and realistic capacity come together.
Start with Audience > Goal > Capacity
Small purpose-led organisations often need to communicate with several audiences at once. A charity might need to reach people looking for support, referrers, volunteers, funders and donors. A CIC might also need local communities, customers, partners or commissioners to understand its work.
You cannot give every audience equal attention all the time.
Start with:
Audience: Who is particularly important for us to reach right now?
Goal: What do we need them to understand or do?
Capacity: What can we realistically deliver consistently?
Perhaps you need more referrals. More volunteer applications. Greater awareness of a particular service. More partner conversations. More donations. Once the goal and audience are clear, you can make a better decision about how to reach them. A channel is simply one route to an audience. Give it a job before giving it your time.
Choose what your team can genuinely sustain
A small organisation may identify five worthwhile marketing activities and still only have enough time to do two properly. That constraint should shape the plan. A strategy that relies on somebody finding several extra hours every week will quickly become difficult to maintain.
Current Small Charity Week guidance reflects this reality for social media, encouraging small charities with limited time to focus their activity and use a schedule they can realistically maintain.
For one organisation, the right mix might be a useful website, a monthly email and consistent LinkedIn activity. For another, local partnerships and Facebook may achieve far more. The right mix depends on who you need to reach, what you need to achieve and the resources you genuinely have available.
Make sure attention has somewhere worthwhile to go
Before putting more time into promotion, check what happens when somebody responds. They see your social post. A partner recommends you. They find you through search. Then what? Can they understand what you do? Can they find the service, event or information that brought them there? Can they make a referral, enquire, volunteer, donate or take whatever next step matters?
Generating more attention for an outdated service page or confusing website may simply send more people towards the same problem. Sometimes improving the destination deserves priority before increasing the promotion around it.
Use a simple priority filter
For each marketing activity you are considering, ask:
Activities that struggle to pass several of those tests deserve closer scrutiny. Apply the same questions to things you already do. Small organisations accumulate marketing over time: another social platform, an old newsletter, a recurring campaign, a content schedule nobody quite has time to maintain.
An activity does not deserve permanent priority simply because somebody started doing it. Stopping or reducing something can create the capacity to do something more valuable properly.
Give fewer priorities a clearer purpose
The strongest marketing priority is rarely a particular platform. It comes from knowing who needs your attention now, what you want to achieve with them and what your organisation has the capacity to sustain. Choose a few activities with a clear reason for existing. See what happens. Strengthen the ones that show value and question the ones that continually consume effort without enough return.
If your team is spreading its time across too many marketing activities, Grinning Graphics can help you decide what deserves attention, what can be simplified and what can stop.