The fundamentals haven’t changed: what 30 years of copywriting teaches NGOs
I recently sat down for a chat with content writer and marketing consultant Ant Bullock. Ant has been writing professionally for around 30 years, across pretty much every channel you can think of: TV, radio, outdoor, web, email and social. Given how much the tools of his trade have changed in that time, I was curious about what, if anything, has stayed the same.
His answer was simple. The principles haven’t changed.
Who is this actually for?
“Who’s the audience, and what do they actually care about?” For Ant, that question is still the starting point for every piece of work, and still the thing clients most often haven’t thought deeply enough about. Organisations naturally write from their own internal perspective, and the real value an outside writer brings is objectivity.
This chimed with our experience running discovery workshops. A large part of the job is simply getting what’s in people’s heads out onto the page. As Ant put it, clients sometimes think what they’re telling you is obvious, then you look at their existing website “and it’s nowhere to be seen”. They don’t realise they haven’t told the world.
Interestingly, Ant thinks AI has made this problem more visible rather than solving it. The blank page used to be the barrier; now anyone can ask a chatbot what to say. But the results are often “misguided, or miss the point”, because the underlying question of the audience was never answered. The thinking was always the hard part.
Where NGOs go wrong
Much of our conversation focused on the sector we both spend a lot of time in. Ant was refreshingly blunt: “Jargon and acronyms are a particular weakness for NGOs”. He understands that people in the sector see specialist language as signalling belonging as well as shorthand. The trouble is that it excludes everyone who isn’t already in the club.
I offered up “theory of change” as an example. Working in this sector, I know exactly what it means. Before that, looking in from the outside, I had no idea. Ant agreed he’d avoid the phrase wherever he had the choice: fine on an institutional page where everyone is in the know, but with no emotive value for the casual visitor who saw the organisation mentioned on the news and wants to understand what they’re about.
The other habit he sees is over-complexity. NGOs often describe what they do and how they do it in a way that requires a diagram, but that diagram ends up being a two-page PDF. His advice is to keep simplifying until you have an elevator pitch a lay person can grasp. It might take a full day to get to those three sentences, but once you have them, every page on the site can be seen through them as a lens.
Navigation does a lot of quiet work here too. NGOs typically serve wildly different audiences at once: government institutions, major donors, delivery partners, and someone who wants to give a small donation. Clear signposting means the institutional visitor and the individual supporter each land on a page written in the right register for them.
Showing impact
For NGOs, the million-dollar question is how to demonstrate impact on a website. Ant’s view is that it has to be a blend. Big statistics establish scale and credibility, and country-level reporting shows rigour. But the single human story, the one child who now goes to school (for example), is what people actually respond to. Even the institutional donor who wants to see a 12% improvement in educational attendance “will still respond to a single kid who’s suddenly got a future”.
That matches what we’ve found designing for organisations like the Crop Trust; the numbers earn trust, the stories earn attention, and the site structure has to let both do their job.
The AI elephant in the room
We couldn’t avoid it! Ant is neither a cheerleader nor a doom-monger, but he was honest about what’s changed. He’s already been handed AI-generated copy and asked to “tidy it up”, work he can do but doesn’t want: “I like to engage, collaborate, solve problems. To be on the edge tidying a few bits up is not very fulfilling.”
He drew a comparison with the arrival of desktop publishing in the late 80s, when companies handed the new software to whoever was available and got appalling-looking brochures full of spelling mistakes. The tool was capable but the people using it weren’t trained.
That feels like the right note to end on. AI has removed the blank page, and we use it ourselves where it genuinely helps. But the work that makes content effective, understanding your audience, structuring the message, saying it simply and honestly, is the same work it was 30 years ago. The organisations that invest in that thinking will be the ones who cut through.
-
Matt Keogh
Creative Director and Co-owner
