Creating an impact through comms
Although there have been many challenges for our sector this year, charity communicators have helped ensure messages cut through and had positive real world impact.
Understanding our members’ needs and keeping our finger on the pulse enabled us to respond to topical issues from how to navigate an election year, and harness the power of AI and ethical storytelling.
We’re really proud of what we have achieved, and we end the year in a strong position. Our membership, the number of people in our network and the level of engagement are all growing. Our reserves are healthy and our forecasted income for 2024 is £824,000.
“I really value the work you do to lift the sector up, celebrate and educate.”
– CharityComms organisational member
Adeela Warley
CEO at CharityComms
Adeela joined us as CEO in Feb 2017, having previously been a CharityComms trustee and Head of Communications at Friends of the Earth.
Mark Russell
Chair of Trustees at CharityComms
Mark was appointed as CharityComms Chair in March 2019 and has previously been Chair of the Cleft Lip and Palate Association.
A note of thanks from our Chair
Thank you for your generosity
I wanted to start my reflections on 2023-24 at CharityComms with some important thank-yous.
The first is to all our members, who continue to be our life-blood, enabling us to fulfil our objects as a charity through an unwritten contract of support, shared learning and community that drives and informs all our work supporting charity communicators. This extends also to our wider community of third sector colleagues and partners, as we continue to explore collaborations and joint working on projects and pilots.
Second, a thank you to our staff team, who are more diverse and more geographically spread than ever as we continue to source the best talent to carry out our mission and member-focused activity. Their dedication and passion for CharityComms and the members we serve is second to none, and as a Board we are rightly proud of the quality of our team and senior leadership.
I’d also like to thank our Trustees, new and old, who as a Board have helped steer CharityComms through a significant period of strategising and investment planning.
After saying goodbye to Trustees Lucy Devine, Pip Gardner and Muna Hussen in the period, the Board was strengthened with four new member-elected trustees. And all our Trustees have contributed time, presence, insight and challenge in equal and well-judged measure.
This period saw us take a step back from day-to-day issues and the challenging context charities and the sector are operating in, to consider how best to maintain and build future relevance, value and innovation into our programme of delivery for members.
We worked closely with our senior leadership team to assess how to enhance existing services and experience, and where to innovate to add further value and depth of impact for comms professionals in our sector.
The result is a new strategic plan that sees CharityComms draw on our reserves, which stood at £352,132 at the end of this period, to invest in the people, processes, systems and infrastructure of CharityComms, to improve members’ user experience, enhance the mentoring experience, and build new services and tools that meet short-term and longer-term strategic needs of our members.
As we move into the implementation phase for this new strategy, I hope you don’t mind a moment of reflection as the completion of my six-year term of office as Chair looms in March 2025.
The last five and a half years have been an inspiration, drawn from working with knowledgeable, passionate and dedicated comms professionals – in CharityComms, among our board of Trustees, and within our diverse and resilient membership community.
It has been a pleasure and honour to work with Adeela and her team, and I have learned so much about the needs of the sector through them. Special thanks too, to Sarah Welsh and CJ Marshall, who as Treasurer and Vice Chair respectively, have given me ample support and advice along the way. As a team, we have been able to steer the charity through the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and a constantly evolving communications landscape.
As we recruit a new Chair in the coming months, I am confident that in our Trustee Board, our staff team and our wonderful membership community and wider network, CharityComms is well placed to continue to serve and champion communications professionals in the sector – with insight and innovation, partnership, passion and warmth.
Growing and supporting our membership community
We are privileged to be the membership organisation for charity communications professionals, and everything we do is aimed at championing best practice in communications across the charity sector. Our peer-to-peer sharing network is like no other and our members are the heart of CharityComms.
We ended the year with 355 individual members, 74 corporate partners and 552 organisational members. Taking into account the very small organisations who are part of a larger charity’s membership, the total number of charities in our network was 986. Our community grew to more than 13,350 people, with almost 3,500 new contacts added throughout the year.
Membership offers a range of benefits, including free access to live online events and a fantastic range of on-demand content. Organisational members also have access to our mentoring scheme, free job listings and a discount on the award winning Charity Digital Benchmark.
“CharityComms has been my favourite source of work in the last year or so. I’ve loved the projects that have been born out of the inquires I’ve had via the directory. They really have been my favourite jobs of 2023.”
Seismic shifts
AI technology has dominated the landscape, driving rapid and unpredictable change and testing leaders and communications teams on how to respond and embrace the change. CharityComms has helped to share the latest thinking, and explore the opportunities and risks. Early in the year we ran our seminar, Harnessing the power of AI in charity communications, and created an AI information hub to support charities and help them adopt a considered and ethical approach to testing AI.
The political context has been volatile, often driving divisive narratives which creates a hostile environment for charity campaign communications. Helping charities to be seen, heard and understood was the goal for our seminar: Framing comms in an election year and beyond. We were delighted to launch a second cohort of training in partnership with Heard, to help embed the knowledge and tools of framing, needed to support long-lasting change.
Thought leadership, practical resources and growing our online community
Over the year, we published 52 new articles and blogs, working with our members and the wider sector to cover a range of issues, provide valuable insights, spark ideas, and offer tips and practical examples.
Our following on Twitter/X grew to 51,884 and to 17,138 on LinkedIn, while subscribers to eNews, our regular email update to members and non-members, grew to more than 11,000.
“For some of us you’re the only link to other charities and opportunity to learn from them. Thank you for being there.”
Learning together through our events
We recognise that communicators remain overstretched and time poor, and there’s increased competition for their attention. We ran 39 events for 5,169 delegates this year, down from 8,285 delegates the previous year.
Our satisfaction rate held steady this year, with 92% of delegates rating their satisfaction levels as either ‘very satisfied’ (47.78%) or ‘satisfied’ (44.55%).
“You guys have just got virtual events licked now – it’s been great to watch them evolve so well since the pandemic threw us all into a virtual world. Thanks for your commitment to keep learning and improving!”
Mentoring scheme
During the previous financial year, our popular mentoring scheme had seen applications increase to more than 220 annually, so in 2023 we scoped and developed a new mentoring platform to allow mentors and mentees to create an online profile to make direct matches.
We consulted with current and previous mentors and mentees on how the functionality would work, as well as looking at other examples of mentoring platforms, and worked with our WordPress developer to build a login area where both mentors and mentees sign up online to create a profile. Mentees are able to search the directory for a potential mentor and send a direct request to whoever they think would be a good match. The scheme is exclusive to our organisational members, although anyone is welcome to apply as a mentor.
The new platform has allowed for greater flexibility and ease of use for all involved, as well as the ability to make more matches and meet demand from our members. We also created new resources and supporting guidelines for both mentors and mentees, including a mentor meeting check-list and a mentoring action plan.
“I absolutely love the mentoring scheme. I always want to find a way to help other people in their careers, as I have had so much support throughout mine. This is a great way to do that. I also really like the specificity of it and it’s clear what the other person wants to get out of the year.”
Jobs board
During the year we posted 663 roles on our jobs board, which continues to be one of our most popular website pages, with more than 24,500 views during the year. The most popular job titles were Communications Manager, Communications Officer, social media Officer, Marketing and Communications Manager and Digital Marketing Manager.
“We love CharityComms! The training and networking support and also the fantastic jobs platform is such a boon for our membership fee. In our current recruitment round, approximately 7% of our applicants came through the CharityComms job board, and we can always be assured of the applicant quality.”
Charity Digital Benchmark
Our collaboration with Uprise Up on the Charity Digital Benchmark continues to ensure that this award-winning digital
resource measures the digital impact of charities in the most effective way possible, providing a unique comprehensive overview of their performance covering key metrics such as traffic patterns, device usage, bounce rates, repeat users, and channel effectiveness
charity member organisations
people in our growing community
Listening and responding to our members and the wider sector
Feedback from members is key in prioritising the content that we produce. We monitor what communicators need through our owned channels like website analytics and newsletter engagements, as well as reviewing our survey feedback or what’s happening more broadly across the sector.
Some content we’ve created during the past year because of our listening includes a dedicated AI hub to help charity communicators and their team navigate the dynamic and developing world of AI, as well as an online quiz, inspired by the Strategic Marketing Conference, to help communicators pin down their marketing persona.
“Took the CharityComms quiz to find out my marketing character…When being shown my result, I was prompted to download social media assets. The best part is that there’s an accompanying document which includes alt text for each asset. That, my friends, is accessibility and inclusion right there.”
A new chapter for CharityComms
This year we were not only able to enhance our current portfolio but to think and plan for the future and step into a more innovative and creative space. We asked ourselves – what next? And how best to deliver our charitable purpose and respond to our members’ most pressing needs. Our new organisational strategy for 2024-2027 draws on insights from the trustees, the team and what we have heard from our members and will help us to enhance our portfolio and develop an exciting new programme of work.
“Thanks so much for all of your support. Our organisational membership with CharityComms has made me feel less lonely as a communications professional. It’s given me access to an inspiring network of like-minded people and valuable training, events, conferences which have developed my skills and knowledge in this profession.”
You can also see Annual Reports from previous years on our main Annual Reviews page.
Image credit: Moose Photos on Pexels.