Hello {{first_name}}, you're in great company. You're joining 3,150 charity leaders and social impact professionals reading this each week, all of us working on the same craft: stories that build trust, unlock funding, and make change visible.

Last week, after the edition on protected stories, I asked you which part of the work feels hardest right now. The answers:

What this tells us: Half of you said the hardest part is the line-by-line judgement call about which details to change and which to keep. That is a craft question, not a principle question. You are not unsure whether to protect the person. You are unsure how, sentence by sentence. The remaining votes split evenly between internal worry about the person's safety and external pressure from press or funders. Nobody flagged the consent withdrawal process gap, which is interesting in a different way. It might mean those processes are in place. It might mean we have not yet started treating consent as a live document. Worth a private check.

The craft question, sentence by sentence, who am I really writing this for, sits underneath this week's edition too. Different surface. Same discipline.

I have been speaking to a number of UK comms managers over the last few weeks, and I'm seeing an interesting pattern.

When a charity comms team tells me their social posts are not landing, my first instinct used to be to ask, "who is your audience?" That question turns out to be the wrong one. Most teams can answer it. They know who they are trying to reach. They have personas, target audiences, segment lists, and a working sense of who is on each platform.

The actual problem is not who the audience is. The actual problem is what happens to that audience inside the post itself.

I call it audience drift. It is what happens when a post starts aimed at one reader, then drifts to another, then drifts to a third, all inside the same draft, and nobody on the team notices. The reader who opened the post has, by paragraph two or three, disengaged emotionally and quietly walked off.

Picture a small charity comms lead drafting a Tuesday post. They are trying to reach the people their service exists for, specifically the ones still hesitating about whether to walk through the door for the first time. The draft reads like this:

Read it once at speed and it sounds like a perfectly reasonable charity post. Read it again, sentence by sentence, and the drift is everywhere.

The first paragraph is for the hesitant service user. Specific, kind, recognisable. The reader sees themselves.

The second paragraph drifts. "Last year we supported 437 people" is a funder line. The person who came to this post hesitating about whether to walk in does not need the headcount. They need to know whether the door is going to open for them. The next sentence is worse: "Our clinical model is the only one of its kind in the borough" is positioning for a commissioner or a funding body, not reassurance for someone already nervous about asking for help.

The third paragraph drifts again. "Supporters like you" addresses a donor. The hesitant service user, who walked into this post in sentence one, has now been quietly handed off twice and asked for money by sentence six. They are gone. They were gone halfway through.

The post had three audiences inside it. Each one got a few sentences before being passed on to the next. None of them recognised themselves clearly enough to act. The post got polite, unmemorable engagement, and the team wondered, again, why social media never seems to convert.

The team did not write a bad post. They wrote three half-posts in the same draft.

Here is what the same post looks like written entirely for the named reader. Same brand, same tone, same length. The funder line and the donor ask are not lost. They are next week's posts, on their own days, written for the audiences they actually belong to.

Every sentence is talking to the same person. And that person, for the first time in the post, can tell exactly who they are reading. They are far more likely to walk in.

Try this on the last post your team published. Read it line by line and ask, after every sentence, "is this still for the same person it started with?" Almost always, the answer is no. Two or three sentences have drifted somewhere they do not belong.

Drift is not laziness. It is the natural consequence of writing in committee, even when there is no committee. Most charity comms leads carry the entire organisational stakeholder map in their heads when they write. The funder taps them on the shoulder and reminds them to put the numbers in. The trustees remind them to thank donors. The CEO reminds them to land the vision. The service user, who was supposed to own this post, gets quietly elbowed out of their own post by everyone else.

A blank text box is the easiest place in a charity for stakeholder anxiety to express itself. So the post becomes a small, polite version of the entire stakeholder map.

The reader on the other end feels this. They cannot name it. They just feel that the post is not quite for them. So they scroll on.

UK donations fell in 2025 for the first time since 2021. Six in ten charities are operating at a loss. The one thing the sector cannot afford right now is to keep posting drafts where the reader has been quietly elbowed out.

When I post about our charity, Naz and Matt Foundation, my first draft almost always drifts. I will start writing for parents who have just been told their child is gay, and by paragraph three I am writing for a sector peer about safeguarding policy. Every time, I have to go back and cut the drift. Sometimes that means the post becomes one paragraph instead of four. Sometimes it means I split it into two posts, on different days, for different audiences.

The post that goes out is the post that survived the drift cut. The deleted lines are not lost. They are the next post.

The question your team should be asking before publishing is not "who is our audience?"

You probably already know. The question is "did the audience stay the same all the way through?"

That reframe changes the work. It does not require a new strategy or a new content calendar. It requires a small, deliberate edit before the post goes out. A drift test, run line by line, that takes about ninety seconds.

The post that survives the drift test will outperform the post that does not, every time. Not because it is cleverer. Because the reader, for the first time, can tell exactly who they are reading.

Run this after the post is drafted, before it goes out. Five steps. Ninety seconds.

Step 1. Name the reader. In one sentence, write down the single human this post is supposed to address. Specific enough that you could picture them. If you cannot do this in one sentence, the post is not ready to go out.

Step 2. Open check. Does the first sentence sound like it was written to that one person? Read it aloud. If it could be addressed to anyone in your list of stakeholders, it has not yet been written for the named reader. Rewrite it.

Step 3. Middle scan. Read the rest of the post one sentence at a time. After each sentence, ask: "is this still for the same reader?" Mark every sentence that has drifted to a different audience. The most common drift targets are funders, sector peers, and trustees. Spot which one is pulling at your sleeve.

Step 4. Close check. Does the closing call to action ask the named reader to do something they would actually do? Or does it ask them to do something a different audience would do? A donor "give now" tagged onto a service-user post is the most common close-mismatch in the sector.

Step 5. Cut or split. Every drifted sentence has two homes. Either cut it from this post entirely (it does not serve this reader). Or save it for a different post, on a different day, for the audience it actually belongs to. Drift cuts are not waste. They are next week's drafts.

The post that comes out the other side of the test is rarely the post that went in. It is shorter. It speaks to one person. It asks for one thing. And it works.

Use after drafting any post, before it goes out. Pen and paper is fine. Notion, your free notes app, or a sticky note is fine. The point is the discipline, not the tool.

How to use this AI prompt:

If you use this in practice and find a drift type the prompt misses, hit reply and tell me. I am refining it edition by edition.

If you found this newsletter useful, please forward it to a colleague and invite them to subscribe at:
www.impactstoryteller.org

Until next week, sending you safe and peaceful energy

Matt Mahmood-Ogston
Award-winning impact storyteller, photographer and charity CEO.
Portfolio: ogston.com