Useful thinking without the consultancy fog.

The question I hear most often from charity leaders isn’t “which AI tool should we use?” It’s “where do we even start?”

That’s actually a better question than it sounds. Starting with tools is the wrong approach. Starting with your team’s actual workload is the right one.

AI tools like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Claude (Anthropic’s tool) are genuinely useful for charities — but only when matched to real tasks. The most common quick wins are: drafting grant applications and reports, summarising meeting notes, writing donor communications, and building first drafts of social media content.

None of these require a large technology budget or a specialist hire. They require someone to spend a day or two identifying the right tool for the job and showing the team how to use it.

The reason many charities stall isn’t technical — it’s cultural. People worry about AI producing inaccurate information, or that it will replace roles. Both concerns are valid, but manageable. AI should be treated as a first-draft tool that a human reviews, not an autonomous decision-maker.

The organisations that benefit most from AI are the ones that treat it practically. Pick one problem. Find one tool that addresses it. Use it consistently for a month. Then expand.

That’s it. No transformation programme required.

Advertising can amplify a working marketing foundation. It can’t create one.

I see this regularly with small businesses: they invest in Facebook or Google ads, get disappointing results, and conclude that “digital marketing doesn’t work for us.” Usually, the problem isn’t the ads. It’s that the foundations weren’t in place before they ran them.

Here are the three things to get right before you spend a penny on paid advertising.

1. Know exactly who you’re talking to

Not “SMEs in the Midlands” — that’s a category, not an audience. You need to understand specifically who buys from you, what problem they’re trying to solve, and what language they use to describe it. The more precisely you can describe your ideal client, the better every piece of communication you produce will be.

2. Have a clear message

You should be able to answer “what do you do?” in one sentence that a non-specialist can understand. If your website takes three paragraphs to explain your value, that’s a problem to fix before you run ads. Ads drive traffic to your existing messaging — if that messaging is vague, you’ll pay for clicks that don’t convert.

3. Have somewhere useful to send people

A landing page, a contact form, a booking link. People who click on your ad need a clear and immediate next step. If your website is outdated, hard to navigate, or doesn’t have a contact method, fix that first.

Once these three things are in place, advertising becomes a volume lever. Without them, you’re paying to reach people and then losing them.

Most small teams are sitting on automation capabilities they’re not using. The tools are already there — they’re just not being applied.

1. Meeting follow-up notes

If you use Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, both have built-in AI transcription and summary features. Turn them on. After every meeting, you get an automatic summary with action items. Review and edit it, then send it. This takes five minutes instead of thirty.

2. Email triage

Microsoft Copilot and Gmail’s AI features can summarise long email threads and flag the ones that need a response. If you or your team spends a significant part of the day managing email, this alone can recover an hour or two per week.

3. First drafts of routine communications

Monthly donor updates, event announcements, grant progress reports — anything with a repeating structure is a good candidate for AI assistance. Give an AI tool the key facts and ask it for a first draft. Edit from there rather than starting from a blank page.

4. Social media scheduling

Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite (both have free tiers) let you batch-create and schedule social media posts. Spend two hours on the first Monday of the month, schedule four weeks of content, and it’s done.

5. Appointment booking

If you’re still managing appointments manually via email, stop. Calendly (free for basic use) lets people book directly into your calendar with automatic confirmations and reminders. This eliminates back-and-forth email chains entirely.

None of these require a specialist. They require an afternoon to set up and a decision to change a habit.

When people hear “growth strategy” they often picture a large document with market analysis, competitor matrices and five-year projections. That’s not what a small organisation needs.

It needs to answer three questions

First: where is your best growth opportunity? Not every opportunity — just the clearest one given your current position, resources and constraints.

Second: what specifically do you need to do to pursue it? Not general actions, but specific ones with owners and timelines.

Third: how will you know if it’s working? At least one measurable indicator per growth lever, reviewed at least quarterly.

That’s the core of it. Everything else is detail.

What it doesn’t need

A comprehensive competitive analysis of every player in your market. A five-year financial model with five scenarios. A SWOT analysis that takes two days to produce and sits in a folder.

The most common problem

The most frequent issue I see with small organisations’ approach to growth isn’t a lack of ambition or capability. It’s having too many priorities.

When everything is a priority, nothing is. A good growth strategy gives you permission to say no to things — because you have a clear picture of what you’re saying yes to.

If your strategy doesn’t help you decide what not to do, it’s not doing its job.