There are so many aspects of digital marketing for charities that it can be difficult to know where to start. Charity blogs are often underutilised in the third sector but are a great way to flex your creative muscles and show your organisation’s personality.

Do I need to write blogs on my charity website?

Blogging can feel like a challenge for busy charity teams, but it’s necessary to build authority and credibility with both visitors to the site and search engines. Populating your site with plenty of content allows you to cover all areas of interest.

Benefits of writing a charity blog

So why write a blog for your nonprofit website? There are many advantages to regularly updating your blog that benefit you, your service users and your donors. Discover the benefits of content marketing for charities.

Showcase impact and stories

There’s no way you can succinctly cover all the great work your organisation does on your charity’s homepage or service page. While your Impact page needs to effectively summarise your charity’s efforts, the blog is a space to delve beyond the headlines. Building out these stories provides valuable and often much-needed context that you can’t do justice elsewhere on the site. For funders, they’re looking here to see strong evidence of the work you’re doing through case studies and storytelling.

Writing for each niche

Writing plenty of sub-pages means whatever the user intent and journey, you’re providing a page for them to land on. Take the example of The Story Project, using books to improve PSHE, wellbeing and literacy in schools. While teachers are the core audience, search data shows a much wider ecosystem:

Parents of school-age children
School counsellors
Head teachers and curriculum leads
Inclusion and EDI leads.

The blog provides an opportunity to speak to each of these audiences independently, and rather than giving top-line information like on service pages the blog can explore topics in more detail. It gives time and consideration to your reader and tailors the content more specifically to their needs.

Ranking in SEO

There are thousands of ways someone might end up on your website from Google. Perhaps they’re looking for volunteering opportunities, or want to read feel good stories, or educate themselves on something in your niche. There may be hundreds of individual search terms that ultimately lead a user to you, and having plenty of keyword-rich, highly relevant content on your website will help them land on your website.

In the instance of Llamau, Wales’s largest charity, their audience may be searching for:

The blog provides an opportunity for Llamau to target different keywords on each page. Splitting out content marketing topics enables charities to tailor content according to how people are searching. The more varied content you can provide, the more search terms you can potentially rank for.

Use our free meta writing guide for charities to help you write optimised meta titles and descriptions for your blog. This will boost visibility in Google and compelling meta can help drive traffic to your website, encouraging users to click through.

Building Trust and Authority

Building trust is vital for building relationships with all areas of your audience - donors, volunteers, beneficiaries and stakeholders. Your charity website’s blog is the perfect place to expand on all the ways you demonstrate trustworthiness and authority. This could be writing on topics such as securing funding, winning awards, showcasing case studies and testimonials.

Authority is also increasingly important as search engines and AI platforms use authority as a qualifier for whether or not your content will be featured in results. One great way to build authority is with a well-written author bio. Attributing your charity blog to a real author helps humanise your organisation and signals to AI and Google that it was written by a real expert. Having a small number of contributors with expertise in different areas showcases the expertise across your teams and reassures readers that they can trust the content.

What should charities blog about?

There’s no rules for what you should include when writing for nonprofits, but if you need inspiration there are some areas that prove popular with audiences. Where possible, vary your content across a range of topics such as:

Impact through case studies and data-focused report content
Service user stories
Volunteer and staff spotlights
Research, industry news and insights
How-to guides relevant to your audience
Campaign updates
Event recaps.

It helps to create a content calendar and plan out 2-3 months at a time so you’re not scrambling for ideas. If ever you’re stuck for ideas, you could always invite a guest blogger to write for your charity website. Bringing in contributors who cover other areas of expertise is a great way to get new eyes on your content.

Why structure is important in a charity blog

The formatting of your blog post is as important as the content itself. First and foremost, you need to write for your human readers, breaking up content into an easily digestible piece rather than a wall of text. Using structures H1s, H2s and H3s (headings) also makes your content more accessible to screen readers, as the tech understands in what order to read your blog page.

Book onto our next accessibility webinar to learn about tools that make this easier to understand, such as HeadingsMap.

Structure also has the added benefit of allowing LLMs (Large Language Model, a type of AI) to read and process your content. That means when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude a question in your realm of expertise, the AI platforms can find the answer in your content and surface your website in its recommendations.

Having robust guidelines for your blog also helps with consistency. Consistent title capitalisation, structure, wordcount and overall style help readers recognise your charity content.

Get the free blog template for charities

We’ve created a free, downloadable template for charities to help you format your charity blogs for maximum impact. It includes recommendations on both structure and strategy for copywriting for charities. From ranking in Google to making your content reader-friendly, our blog structure guide will make writing for nonprofits easy!

Blog writing guide for charities (with free blog template)