Ask most small charity comms teams how their week went and you’ll get some version of the
same answer. It was meant to be about the appeal plan. Instead it was a funder wanting a case
study by Thursday, a trustee asking for a post about their event, the website falling over and a
journalist ringing about something completely unrelated.

So the appeal plan moves to next week. And next week looks exactly the same.
It’s very easy to see that as a personal failing. If only we were more organised, or better at
saying no. I’ve heard a lot of very capable people beat themselves up about it, and I’ve led
teams that worked like this, where I was the one saying yes to the urgent thing because it felt
helpful at the time.

Why it keeps happening

I don’t think reactive teams are badly run. I think they’re doing exactly what the organisation has
set them up to do.

Think about how a lot of small charities are funded. Money comes in for projects, and much less
of it comes in for the people holding everything together. So there’s often nobody whose actual
job is to step back and plan. The comms person is also doing the admin, and the chief exec is
the fundraising system as well as the person who locks up at night. When everyone is stretched
across more than one job, whatever’s shouting loudest wins.

Then requests come in from everywhere. Trustees, partners, funders, service teams, the local
paper. Each one is perfectly reasonable on its own, and nobody is in charge of the total.

Christmas happens every year

What I find most interesting is how much of the urgent stuff is completely predictable. Christmas
happens every year, and so does the big funder’s reporting deadline. But because nobody had
time to plan for them in the quiet months (and there are no quiet months), they arrive as
emergencies anyway.

Working harder won’t fix it. Most of these teams are already working flat out.
What does help is fairly unglamorous. A simple calendar of everything you already know is
coming, made once and actually looked at, so Christmas stops being a surprise in November.
And someone senior enough to protect the plan when the next request lands. In a lot of small
charities that means the chief exec saying “not this month” to a trustee, so the comms person
doesn’t have to.

That second one matters more than people expect. A plan only survives in a small charity if
somebody with some authority is willing to stand behind it, and usually that person is as
stretched as everyone else. If I’m completely straight with you, that’s a lot of what I end up doing
for clients. The strategy part is often the easy bit.

If you want to test all this, look back over the last month and list everything that landed as
urgent. Then mark the ones you could have seen coming. Put those in next year’s calendar
now, while you still remember how much they hurt.