How to find clarity in your charity messaging

For charities, messaging clarity is essential to connecting with and serving their audience. It helps people grasp who you are, why you exist, and how they can be part of your story. When messaging isn’t clear, even the most meaningful work can go unnoticed. Supporters might struggle to describe what you do, partners might misunderstand your focus, and teams can start pulling in different directions. Not only can this cause friction internally, but it can also result in the loss of potential support from donors, volunteers, campaigners, and funders.

The loss of clarity in messaging can stem from a few places, and charities often come to us with one (or more) of the same challenges. This typically includes a lack of alignment across the organisation in what they say or how they say it, trying to say too much at once, or losing sight of who their messages are really for.

In this article, we’ll look at how we address some of these issues and how we develop charity messaging so it stays true to an organisation’s values, mission and heart.

As charities grow, add new services, or welcome new people, messaging can start to drift. Before you know it, different teams are describing the same charity in completely different ways that can feel disjointed and incoherent. That’s why when we take on a brand messaging project, we always begin with an organisation-wide questionnaire. This helps us to sense-check how different teams describe the charity’s purpose and work, often revealing where language diverges and clarity breaks down.

Our role is to then bring the team back together around simple, repeatable ideas and language that feel natural, honest, and aligned with the organisation’s strategy and values. If those values or ideas no longer feel true, we’ll first work with the team to redefine them, then build unified messaging around that new foundation.

“We needed to refresh our brand messaging to make it clearer, more accessible and better explain our work. Studio Republic guided us through a series of workshops that helped us to articulate why we do what we do. Having a third party steer the process gave us an external perspective that it can sometimes be hard to find when you work within an organisation. We’re really excited to launch our new purpose, mission and vision statements and a brand new SSE manifesto.”

David McGlashan
Head of Sales and Marketing, SSE

Charities do a lot of good work, and it’s tempting to talk about all of it at once. But when messaging tries to cover everything, it can dilute the core story, leaving audiences unsure what the charity really stands for.

During a recent workshop, I asked participants to all say their name, job title, and years of service at the same time. It was chaos! And while a bit of fun, it perfectly illustrated how hard it is for any one message to cut through when several are competing for attention.

In these situations, our job is to clarify two key things: why the charity exists and who it exists for. Once that’s clear, we can start crafting a focused story that educates and inspires people to believe in, and advocate for, the cause.

That doesn’t mean everything else is unimportant. It’s simply about timing and relevance. We often create messaging frameworks that map out the different levels of messaging, who they’re for, and when they’re needed along the audience journey. For example, if a charity has a highly technical process that only matters to a subset of supporters, we don’t need to lead with it. Instead, clear website journeys or comms structure can guide people to the details when they’re ready for them.

Your reason for being, if true and well explained, should resonate with everyone. The more specific programme or service information can then be shared at the right stage of engagement.

Although audiences are at the heart of every charity’s mission, they can easily be forgotten when writing copy. Internal plans might span years and cover complex strategies, but the audience isn’t privy to that. In moments of crisis or need, they’re looking for clear, relevant information, not a five-year plan.

Jargon and the “curse of knowledge” can also be major barriers. The terminology, acronyms and insight used every day within a charity might mean very little to those outside it, muddying the waters and making it much harder to share your message. As Chip and Dan Heath explain it, “Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it…it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others.” I also refer to this as the Charades Complex – the frustration at your partner in not guessing that your wild hand gestures obviously mean ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ (sorry mum).

An exercise I like to run is to get charities to imagine they’re talking to a 12-year-old when answering questions during a workshop, even including a very unflattering photo of my teenage self as a visual cue! As I say in the workshops, “If you can get that doughnut to understand what you do, you can get anyone to!”

Of course, simplicity alone isn’t enough. To write messages that connect, you need to understand your audiences, their expectations, fears, and misconceptions. This not only shows empathy but also demonstrates that you can meet their needs. We help charities map out their different audiences, identify what each group most needs to hear, and gather real stories or proof that show how the charity meets those needs. From there, we build messaging that’s truly audience-first.