We keep telling small charity teams they need to prioritise. Then we hand them seventeen
organisational priorities and ask why the communications plan isn’t working.

I’ve lost count of how many versions of this I’ve seen. A comms plan with one and a half people
running five social channels, a monthly newsletter and two appeals, plus something called
“raising our profile with funders” that nobody can quite define. A board meeting where
something new gets added and nothing gets taken off.

Then everyone wonders why it all feels so thin.

Most of the small charity teams I work with are ridiculously good at what they do, which is partly
how they end up doing so much of it. Nothing ever gets enough time to properly work.

Where all the extra work comes from

A lot of it comes down to money. When you’re small, every funder feels like it could be the one
that keeps you going, so you write the application for the project that’s slightly off to one side of
what you do. Every new pot of money brings its own reporting, its own messages and its own
little corner of the website. Give it a few years and the organisation is made up of everything it’s
ever been funded to do.

The other reason is that a long list is easier than a short one. Saying no to a trustee’s idea, or to
a partner who wants you on their panel, feels mean when everyone’s only trying to help. If
everything’s a priority, nobody’s pet project gets cut and nobody has to have the awkward
conversation. The strategy gets signed off and everyone goes home happy, and the cost turns
up later in the team, who are now trying to deliver all of it.

What have you stopped doing?

When I ask an organisation what it’s stopped doing to make room for its priorities, there’s
usually quite a long pause.

So I ask it early now. What have you added in the last twelve months, and what have you taken
away? If the answer to the second half is nothing, then whatever else is going on, you’ve got
more plan than you’ve got people to deliver it. Better comms and cleverer fundraising won’t fix
that, because neither of them makes the week any longer.

I also ask three people the same question, separately. What’s the priority for the next six
months? Then I write down exactly what each of them says, in their words, not mine. In a
surprising number of organisations I get three different answers, and they’re all perfectly
reasonable. The chief exec might say income, the comms lead might say the website, and the
service manager might say the waiting list. Nobody’s wrong, but it means everyone is pulling in
a slightly different direction and quietly wondering why everything feels so hard.

Once you can see that, you can have a proper conversation about what the organisation is
trying to do this year, instead of an argument about whether you should be on TikTok.
Everything else then gets judged against that.

For most small organisations it ends up being two or three things. Which means being willing to
do some things less well, or not at all, so the things that matter get done properly. I know that
can sound harsh. But I’ve watched teams visibly relax when somebody senior finally tells them
they can stop doing something.

I find this hard in my own business too, for what it’s worth. I have a lot of ideas, and the hardest
part of running my own company has been deciding which ones not to do.

If you want somewhere to start this week, get your team (or your board, if you’re brave) to write
down everything the organisation is currently doing. Everything, including the things nobody
would ever put in a strategy, like the Facebook group someone set up in 2019 and the partner
newsletter that goes out every quarter whether anyone reads it or not. Then ask each person to
pick the three things the people you serve would miss most if they stopped tomorrow.
Whatever’s left over is where a lot of your capacity has been going.

You don’t have to cut all of it at once. Just pick one thing from the leftover pile and stop doing it
on purpose, and see whether anybody even notices.