When you have a small team, every moment, new idea and piece of content that is created must count.
Thankfully, you don’t need a massive budget or team to create meaningful, strategic content and communications. What you do need is a clear and focused understanding of both audience and organisational needs, as well as a culture of empowerment, trust and consistent ways of working.
Embedding a series of principles and practices can help to support overstretched marcomms teams to deliver audience-first, brand-aligned content that drives results without burnout.
1. Start with strategy: know your why and your audience
Every effective content strategy starts with a clear purpose. Why are you communicating? What outcomes do you need to achieve? Who are you trying to reach and what do they care about?
Use your organisational strategy, marcomms plan and goals combined with your audience insights to build your content themes. Really get to know what your audiences value and tailor your messaging to meet their needs. That focus helps reduce wasted effort and ensures every piece of content works harder.
I was fortunate to work on a brand and values refresh for Cystic Fibrosis Trust back in 2021, which aligned and energised the wider organisation. It’s not just about visual identity as we all know too well — it’s about creating shared purpose and understanding, riding on the back of a collective sense of excitement and helping your colleagues understand what matters most.
Strategy and leadership play a crucial role in setting priorities, making it clear that while everything might feel important, not everything is necessarily important right now.
2. Build smart, consistent, accessible processes and systems
Create a clear content planning framework. This includes:
- A shared content calendar and themes for the year
- Guidelines on tone, visuals and key messages
- Processes for idea submission, approvals and publishing
- Red-flag processes to identify reputational risks early
This saves time, avoids duplication, and ensures everyone is working from the same plan. It also makes it easier to delegate and collaborate across teams.
Empowering teams to create content while maintaining safe processes for review and brand consistency is critical to ensure alignment with wider guidance, while helping to achieve cross-team goals and protect the brand’s reputation.
When content is aligned with values and guided by a clear sign-off process, you reduce risk and boost confidence, allowing you to progress to the next step effectively.
3. Empower your wider organisation
Small marketing and comms teams can’t do it all —in fact, they shouldn’t and don’t have to. Build a network of internal brand champions: colleagues from across departments who are trained and equipped to support content creation and other marketing or comms deliverables.
Here’s how:
- Run regular training sessions on brand, tone of voice, accessibility and storytelling
- Walk through your style guide and templates, explaining the ‘why’ behind the ‘how’
- Provide practical tools (Canva, CMS access, email templates, social media training)
- Encourage simple content creation (e.g. smartphone videos, social media quote graphics)
Make it safe to create. With clear step-by-step instructions including content checklists, editorial and brand reviews – teams can contribute as agreed knowing there’s support if needed. Regular check-ins, kindness and guidance go a long way in keeping quality high and collaboration healthy.
Budget allowing, use freelancers to support at pinch points, especially during major campaigns or when internal capacity is limited. This often works best as part of your planning, not just a reactive solution.
4. Collaborate with subject experts
Great content often comes from the community you are trying to engage, as well as from inside your organisation — such as researchers, frontline staff and service users. Many of these contributors will need your support, so creating a simple content brief template can help to guide them on:
- What’s the purpose of the content?
- Who is it for?
- What’s the key message?
- What’s the call to action?
- What existing content is available or could be available – film, photos, etc.
A short briefing call can provide clarity and assurance. Your team can then polish and finalise content to align with your brand and audience needs.
5. Make data and feedback part of the process
Evidence is so important for effective marketing and comms for several reasons. It builds internal and external trust, helps to sharpen messaging, and ensures campaigns are focused and driven by real needs from the market research, focus groups, digital data and feedback to previous comms.
Comms insights can help when agreeing a course of action internally, but also ensure that the time and effort of the team is being used wisely to further engage audiences or develop the charity’s offers.
When you bring evidence into the conversation from audience insights, analytics and campaign results, this can help shift the focus from opinions to outcomes. This framing is also useful to share in training and strategy sessions to help everyone understand not only how to use the analytical tools where relevant but understand what works and why.
Involve your brand champions in reviewing content performance, shaping future plans and applying learning. This inclusive review creates a sense of collective ownership and helps refine your overall approach to content over time.
6. Avoid burnout with realistic planning
Being strategic also means being selective. You often can’t – and don’t have to – do everything. Be clear on what content delivers the most impact for your audiences and achieves the goals intended and deprioritise the rest. This approach means you can focus on quality over quantity.
Have brave conversations with colleagues early on to manage expectations of what you or the team can deliver– it may not always be a ‘no’, it could be responding with a ‘not now’ or an outline of why a different approach would be more effective.
If you’re suggesting a different route, get wider buy-in from other individuals and departments by sharing how this approach could be more aligned with their goals and the wider objectives of the organisation.
Use a content matrix to map content types against strategic goals and audience needs. Treat planning as a necessary investment, building this resource over time to support repurposing and reuse of a single project into multiple content forms. For example, one long-form interview or conference can become multiple social clips, a blog and a set of quotes.
Structure your plans around organisation-wide priorities, key themes and regular communication calls (quarterly, monthly, weekly). This helps with challenging conversations and pushback. It is helpful when colleagues can see how their project fits into the bigger picture, wider themes and where it doesn’t.
Final thought: culture is imperative
A smart content strategy will only go so far without a supportive internal culture. Celebrate collaboration, be transparent about priorities, and thank your brand champions.
Encouraging an organisation-wide approach where everyone pulls in the same direction is necessary so content, in a small organisation, is not just seen as a job for the comms team.
Your team becomes the strategic heart: supporting, editing, enabling and ensuring content, campaigns and comms resonates, reaches and delivers.
You don’t need a big team to create powerful content — but you do need a clear plan, the right tools, strong leadership, comms oversight and quality control, and a commitment to empowering others. Strategic content marketing for small teams is all about working smarter, not harder.
Want to swap ideas on building content marketing systems or empowering brand champions? Connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a message.
Looking for more advice on how to have more impactful content strategies and processes as a small team? Attend the CharityComms Content Conference on 10 July to discover a wealth of insights and practical frameworks to help you build better content.
