Charities need communications more than ever, so why are fewer asking for help?

Co-founder of Community Comms Collective, Gail Marshall

Most charities focus on a single cause or community. But Community Comms Collective is different – for 13 years it has worked across the entire for-purpose sector, matching skilled communications volunteers with NGOs, charities and community organisations that need support with everything from strategy and messaging through to media relations and digital communications.

That cross-sector view gives co-founder Gail Marshall and her team of fellow trustees and matchmakers an unusually broad read on what is actually happening in the charity comms sector in Aotearoa. And what they're seeing – no surprises here – is an extraordinary amount of pressure.

Government funding is tightening. Securing philanthropic funding and donations is becoming increasingly competitive. Costs continue to rise. At the same time, many charities are being asked to respond to growing need in their communities.

“Charities are getting less and having to do more,” Gail says.

Many charities are too stretched to even ask for help

You might assume that environment would result in more organisations seeking communications support.

After all, when funding becomes harder to secure, being able to clearly explain your impact matters more. When resources are stretched, strong stakeholder relationships become more valuable. When competition for attention increases, effective communications can help organisations stand out.

But Gail and her team have noticed an interesting tension. The need for communications support hasn't disappeared – if anything it's grown. Yet many organisations are so focused on delivering services that they struggle to find the time and headspace to seek help in the first place.

“They don't have the spare resource to go, 'Are we telling our story effectively?' or 'Is our website doing the job we need it to?' They're just scrambling to deliver and are barely coming up for air.”

In fact, the Community Comms Collective is making fewer matches now than it was before COVID – not because the need has dried up, but because organisations don’t seem to have the bandwidth to seek help.

It's a pattern worth understanding, because the instinct to deprioritise communications under pressure tends to make things harder, not easier. Pull back on communications when times get tough, and the things that rely on it most – securing funding, retaining volunteers, maintaining public trust – become harder to hold onto.

Most organisations need clarity first

One of the things Gail has seen in more than a decade of matching charities with communications support is the value the Community Comms Collective can offer right from the get go.

“We provide what I call a diagnostic service,” Gail explains.

Before any volunteer is matched, one of the Community Comms Collective's volunteer matchmakers – experienced communications professionals – spends time understanding what the organisation is trying to achieve.

“Sometimes they’ll come to us with a very specific need or request, other times they know they need help but don’t know where to start.”

Often what the organisation needs sits further upstream – a better understanding of who it is trying to reach and why. That can help define where volunteer support will have the most impact.

“We’ll talk through that need, their wider goals and the constraints they’re working within, then match them with a volunteer who can go in and do the work with them.”

For small charities especially, that kind of clarity can be transformational. Often the challenge isn’t a lack of passion or commitment – it’s a lack of time. Helping organisations cut through competing priorities and identify a few practical communications actions can create momentum at a time where many feel stretched in every direction.

In a tight job market, volunteering is a valuable career move

The pressures playing out in the charity sector are mirrored, in different ways, across the communications profession itself.

Graduate jobs are harder to come by. The public sector – traditionally a significant employer of communications professionals in Wellington – has shed roles. Newer practitioners are finding it increasingly difficult to get meaningful experience, the kind that actually builds confidence and capability rather than just filling a CV.

At the same time, charities are stretched and under-resourced, with communications needs they can't afford to meet.

These two problems offer the same opportunity.

Gail has noticed more students and new graduates signing up to volunteer through the Community Comms Collective, and rather than treating them as a second-tier resource, she's thinking about how to deploy them properly. Her instinct is to pair them with senior volunteers – someone experienced goes in to assess the strategic need and shape the approach, a junior rolls their sleeves up to implement. Organisations get quality strategic thinking; newer practitioners get real, tangible experience that's genuinely hard to find elsewhere.

“You can go in and help them do a plan, do some key messages, and you actually see the impact quite quickly. The boost that gives our volunteers is really lovely.”

For experienced practitioners, it’s that visibility – and the ability to see the tangible impact of their work – that keeps them coming back. Volunteers often see the results of their support quickly and directly.

The Community Comms Collective is deliberately a short-term boost, not a long-term fix. Volunteers go in, help an organisation get clarity, build a plan or sharpen their messaging – and then step back. If the work reveals an ongoing need for communications resource, Gail is clear about that too: the answer isn't more free help, it's making the case for proper investment. Good communications shouldn't be something organisations can only access when a volunteer is available.

“We're about building capability,” says Gail. “We're not there to become someone's communications team.”

A community built around giving back

When Gail and Sue McCabe started the Community Comms Collective in Wellington in 2013, it was a small volunteer initiative. Today, it has grown into a nationwide network of around 600 communications professionals that has helped hundreds of community organisations across the country.

She says she now gets a buzz when she meets people who know the organisation without knowing her connection to it.

“It's way bigger than me and Sue now,” she says. “It's kind of got its own legs.”

That's not a small thing for a 100% volunteer-run organisation that has navigated funding shifts, a pandemic and the current economic climate without chasing grant money or overcomplicating its model. Keeping things simple, and being genuinely useful, has been enough.

But perhaps the more important observation is this: at a time when charities are pulling back on communications because they feel they can't afford it, and when newer practitioners are struggling to find their footing in the profession, the Community Comms Collective quietly offers something that addresses both.

The question for charities navigating these pressures is whether communications is genuinely not a priority – or whether it's simply become the easiest thing to push aside. Because the evidence suggests that when organisations stop communicating well, the problems they're trying to solve only get harder.