From reactive to strategic: building a comms function that lasts
A national environmental NGO · three-year senior comms role
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250% of fundraising goal · ~1M reach on strategy launch · first-ever comms strategy
The starting point
A thirty-year-old organisation with national reach and a comms function still being run on instinct. A small, committed team doing important work without the planning infrastructure to make it land consistently: no overarching objective or strategy, little audience insight and no measurement beyond basic reach and engagement. Content was largely decided day to day. The appetite to do better was there; the foundations weren't.
The build
I came in as the senior comms lead and helped to build the strategic foundations the function was missing - working with the existing team and outside specialists to put them in place.
Working with specialist partners on audience research and messaging, I developed the organisation's first communications strategy from scratch. It included six audience personas, a content framework and a twelve-month plan mapped to the organisation's priorities and research output. I set editorial direction across web, newsletters and social, and co-facilitated the messaging work that gave the organisation a consistent, evidence-led voice.
To make it last beyond me, I created, recruited and developed a new Content Specialist role to own day-to-day delivery, and introduced project-management systems so the whole function - strategy and campaigns - ran transparently, with reporting built in from the start. I also owned the digital budget, advising on how to spend it against the organisation's goals.
The results
The results followed the foundations:
I led the comms for a fundraising appeal that reached 250% of its goal, with more individual donations than ever before and hundreds of new leads added to the database.
I managed the launch of the organisation's five-year strategy, which reached close to a million people.
Engagement rose across priority digital channels, measured properly for the first time.
The point was never any single campaign. It was that, for the first time, the work connected back to a single, deliberate plan and the organisation had the tools to keep it going.
The takeaway
This is the work I now do for other organisations: building the strategy, systems and audience clarity that reactive teams never had time to put in place, leaving behind something the team can actually use.