What I Learned from 15 Years in Media That the Charity Sector Desperately Needs to Hear

By Jack Allen, Founder of Better Said

I want to start with a confession.

For most of my career, I didn't work for charities. I worked for radio stations, media agencies, and content companies. I helped brands sell things. I built audiences for commercial platforms. I spent years obsessing over click-through rates, listener retention figures, and social algorithms - not because I particularly loved any of those things, but because in commercial media, the feedback loop is brutal and immediate. If your content doesn't connect, you find out quickly. There is no polite applause. There is no board of trustees to reassure you that the messaging was "broadly positive." There is just the number, staring back at you, telling the truth.

Then, a few years ago, I started working more closely with organisations in the third sector. And I noticed something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.

The work was extraordinary. The causes were urgent. The people were dedicated in ways that shamed most of the commercial professionals I'd worked alongside. And the communications were, almost without exception, quietly terrible.

Not terrible in a careless way. Terrible in a way that suggested enormous effort had gone into producing something that would reach almost no one, move almost no one, and change almost nothing about how the outside world understood what these organisations did or why it mattered.

I want to explain what I think is going wrong, and why I believe it's fixable.

The audience problem nobody talks about

In fifteen years of commercial media, the single most important thing I learned was this: the audience is not obligated to care.

That sounds obvious, but it isn't. Most charity communications are written as though the reader arrives already convinced, already sympathetic, already engaged, already willing to give their time and attention. They don't. They arrive exactly as they arrive at everything else. They are distracted, a bit sceptical, with seventeen other things competing for their attention and no particular reason to choose your thing.

In social media, we talk all the time about the first 3 seconds of a video reel. In that 3 seconds, you have to convince the audience to keep watching. You have to answer the question, "Why should I watch this", or you risk losing the viewer. Not because they were lazy or uninterested. Because they were human.

The charities I've worked with rarely think in these terms. They think about what they want to say, not about what would make someone want to keep reading. They lead with organisational history rather than human story. They bury the most compelling thing, the actual impact on actual lives, three paragraphs in, underneath a mission statement and a set of objectives.

The fix isn't complicated, but it requires a genuine shift in perspective. Stop writing for yourselves and start writing for the person on the other side of the screen who has no idea who you are and no prior reason to care.

The jargon trap

It's so easy to fall into this trap when trying to justify your position in the third sector. We have all seen sentences like this: "We deliver person-centred, trauma-informed, co-produced interventions that empower vulnerable individuals to achieve positive outcomes across multiple domains of wellbeing."

It looks impressive and fancy on paper, but it means almost nothing to anyone outside the sector. It is the linguistic equivalent of camouflage. It looks like communication while actively preventing it.

I understand why it happens. Sector language evolves for good reasons. "Trauma-informed" and "co-produced" are genuinely meaningful terms within the professional community. Using them signals membership, credibility, alignment with current thinking. But when that language migrates into donor communications, public-facing websites, and social media, when it becomes the default register rather than a specialist tool, it creates a wall between the organisation and the people it most needs to reach.

My linguistics degree gave me an early fascination with how language includes and excludes. Every professional community develops a dialect that functions partly as a bond between insiders and partly as a barrier to outsiders. The question is whether that barrier is serving you.

In most cases, it isn't. The funder reading your application, the potential donor landing on your website, the journalist considering whether your story is worth covering - they respond to plain, specific, human language. Not jargon. Not impact-washing. Not the carefully managed vocabulary of a sector talking to itself.

Say what you mean. Use the words a thoughtful twelve-year-old would understand. Then use your expertise to make sure what you're saying is true.

The numbers illusion

Commercial media taught me something counterintuitive about data: more of it rarely makes your case stronger. In fact, there's a point at which every additional statistic actively weakens your argument, because it signals to the reader that you don't trust them to be moved by the story alone.

Charity impact reports make this mistake constantly. They are dense with data and thin on story. They measure outputs, like the number of people served, the sessions delivered, the meals provided, etc. rather than outcomes - what actually changed in a human life as a result.

I am not arguing against data. Data builds credibility, demonstrates accountability, and satisfies the legitimate needs of funders and regulators. But data without story is a spreadsheet. Story without data is anecdote. The charities that communicate most effectively have learned to weave them together, to let the story carry the emotional weight and let the numbers confirm what the reader already feels.

What the algorithm actually wants (it's not what you think)

I spent years watching organisations chase platform algorithms. They play with posting at optimal times, using trending hashtags, producing content in whatever format the platform was currently rewarding. And I watched most of them exhaust themselves doing it, with diminishing returns.

Here is what I learned: the algorithm, at its core, is trying to solve for one thing. Not virality, not reach, but engagement. The degree to which real people choose to spend time with your content rather than something else.

Depth of connection with a smaller audience almost always outperforms breadth of reach with a larger one, because depth creates the kind of engagement the algorithm rewards and the kind of loyalty that compounds over time.

For charities, this is liberating. You don't need to reach everyone. You need to reach the right people. That's your potential donors, your beneficiaries, your advocates. Then give them something worth their time. Consistency matters more than frequency. Authenticity matters more than production value. A genuine behind-the-scenes moment will outperform a polished campaign almost every time, because it triggers the one thing no budget can buy: the feeling that you are being let in on something real.

The thing that actually makes people give

I studied psychology because I wanted to understand, properly, why people do what they do. And one of the most useful things I've learned , from both academic research and fifteen years of watching audiences behave, is that almost no one does anything for the reason they say they do.

People don't donate to charities because they rationally assessed the cost-effectiveness of the intervention and determined it represented the optimal allocation of their discretionary income. They donate because something made them feel something, and giving felt like the appropriate response to that feeling.

Most charity fundraising communications are aimed at the wrong part of the brain. They make logical arguments for why the cause deserves support. They document need. They demonstrate impact. These things are necessary, but they are not sufficient, and they are not primary.

What is primary is the emotional response that precedes the rational justification. The story of one person, told specifically and honestly, will outperform a summary of a thousand people's needs almost every time. It's not because donors don't care about the thousand, but because the human brain is not built to feel the weight of a thousand simultaneously. It is built to feel the weight of one.

This is not manipulation. It is understanding how human beings actually work, and communicating accordingly.

Why I started Better Said

I've spent a long time sitting with the tension between the world I came from (commercial, metrics-driven, relentlessly focused on audience) and the world I've been drawn towards, which is full of people doing genuinely important work that not enough people know about.

Better Said exists because I think that tension is actually a gift. The third sector doesn't need to become more commercial. It doesn't need to sacrifice its values on the altar of engagement metrics. But it does need to borrow some things. Things such as a rigorous focus on the audience, an honest relationship with language, and an understanding of what makes people stop scrolling and actually feel something.

The causes are urgent. The work is real. And it deserves to be heard by more people than it currently reaches.

That's what I'm here to help with.

Jack Allen is the founder of Better Said, a communications consultancy for UK charities, social enterprises, and public sector organisations. He spent fifteen years in commercial media, including as COO of Dadsnet Media Group, where he helped grow platforms to 6 million followers and 320 million monthly views. He is currently completing an MSc in Psychology at the University of Wolverhampton.

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