We held a retrospective with digital, content and communications leaders from a range of charities and not-for-profit organisations to gauge how things are going and share advice on what people are struggling with.

Here’s their pulse check on the sector and how they are navigating some of the challenges that everyone is facing in their organisations.

Creating psychological safety during team restructures

Leaders shared experiences of restructures, particularly how it feels for those who are holding the team together during the period.

A common thread is the importance of paying attention to how people feel during a restructure; the emotional burden of navigating the unknown, being sensitive with colleagues and knowing how much project work needs to be delivered.

I struggled to manage all of the projects that we have to do while the restructure is happening.

Expectations were not shifted at senior or organisational level and so teams that “have been through it” were still needing to deliver at the same velocity as they had before.

This was also compounded by everyone feeling bruised by the process and the stress affecting how people behaved.

We had several disruptive months of people acting out of character during the restructure.

One leader reflected that the psychological safety they’d created pre-restructure enabled them to have open and honest communication with each other during and after the restructure process. Everyone realised they were not the only one struggling and everyone was feeling similarly.

We ended up being a stronger team.

Working through AI approaches

AI continues to be a complex and much-debated topic for charity digital leaders, with many organisations still determining how best to approach, when and – crucially – why.

We are still trying to work out what our stance is on it.

Most organisations have created cross-departmental working groups to explore ideas, share concerns and work in the open. Inviting a guest speaker is a good way to provide different perspectives or learn how other charities have implemented AI.

One organisation has used their working group to come up with a position statement on AI instead of getting stuck on creating a one-size-fits-all policy. This approach helped people to engage with it rather than feeling like they were told what to do with AI.

Trying out AI tools

Experimenting with the tools is something that a lot of leaders wanted to get more involved with. Some of the recent, practical use cases for AI they’ve tried are:

combatting ‘blank page syndrome’ by giving AI some resources and unorganised thoughts and asking for ideas or document headers to get them started
experimenting with creating a podcast from academic content
using AI to critique something they’ve written
using AI to collate market research of existing reports
creating a first draft framework of something for them to then revisit and make better

My advice for others is to keep testing all of the tools all of the time – they do get better.

One leader reflected that everyone is still in the early adoption stage of AI – or sometimes not even there yet – and so it’s good to look at where you are right now and make the most out of that within your team and organisation.

It can sometimes feel like you have to go through different stages but there are things to get excited about at each stage.

We recognise AI is coming and is being used, but we don’t have a policy and there’s no desire to do anything. It’s one for the horizon for us.

LinkedIn as a viable alternative to X

Over the last couple of years, a discussion on whether to stay on X has become a stalwart in our retros. This time, however, was the strongest conversation on changing tack – explicitly to LinkedIn.

Leaders reflected that LinkedIn offers space to share content on thought-leadership, policy, public affairs and influencing that will actually be read, shared and built upon by their networks. This can be enriched with follow-up stories on funding impact and case studies.

We get more engagement and it also feels like a safer space to share our content.

Funders and foundations use LinkedIn to connect with people who need them.

It’s the only way to reach the audiences that will have the most impact with our funding.

One leader reflected that their organisational departure from X and move to LinkedIn was driven by a need for a platform for policy engagement, but they have also seen wins in engagement with corporate partnerships. Using LinkedIn to strengthen the activation of these partnerships has been game-changing for partners’ employee engagement and connection to the cause.

LinkedIn is not a like-for-like swap though, and leaders expressed a need for the platform to be more community-driven rather than focusing on posts from individuals.

We also discussed the ethics (or lack thereof) of X, particularly in the wake of the news about Grok AI creating and sharing harmful imagery, and subsequent calls to pull the plug on X.

James has shared more thoughts on the cost of ethical misalignment on X and the community-building opportunity of Linkedin on our blog.

Framing investment in brand and awareness campaigns

With everyone knee-deep in 2026–27 business planning, there was a shared challenge around how to frame what is needed to make an impact with digital content, and how hard it is to land this message with decision makers.

Reluctance to invest in top-of-funnel marketing

Cash-giving models are proving hard to generate sustainable returns and leaders are looking at other alternatives and reasons why this is. A common problem is that the digital marketing spend is focused on conversion and a direct ROI, rather than awareness or engagement.

We cannot spend on upper funnel because of budget scrutiny by senior leadership wanting to see £X return on £Y spend.

This also chimes with our own observations of charity digital teams structuring their paid marketing around internal departmental KPIs instead of their audiences’ journeys through their content.

We treat all of our things as separate things but we never think about how to get people from one street to another.

We need to think about user journeys, not our internal departments.

Making the case for awareness as an objective is hard, but in a situation where lots of us are seeing less engagement and conversions on messaging that has previously resonated, it feels like some experimentation on digital calls-to-action is needed.

One leader is testing lead generation as a new way of approaching awareness, linking it back to user journeys.

I think that lead generation is going to be more of a focus for us this year and how we can see the progress particularly across the journey for our donations and regular giving.

Another leader is using the mantra of ‘doing small, planning big’.

I am trying to hold a vision of what could be in my head and then launching minimum viable products.

Conclusion

This session was a reminder of our shared challenges, and how much we all benefit from hearing them out loud.

Thanks for joining us

Graeme Manuel-Jones (SPANA), Katherine Newbigging (Locality), Matthew Farrand (Maudsley Charity), Stephanie Stanesby (Face Equality International), Victoria Logan (Association for Laboratory Medicine), Zoe Hanson (The B Team), Sarah Kingsmill (Battersea) and Anabel Barrero (Action for Children).

Next retrospective

Our next digital leaders retro is on 9 April 2026 from 10am to 11:30am.

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January 2026 digital leaders retrospective

Test and learn approaches to AI, putting user journeys at the heart of ROI, psychological safety in team restructure processes and LinkedIn as a viable alternative to X