Why today’s content is more than just comms
“For a plumber, content has one job: to promote their services. For non-profits, content has always been the work itself,”
Julius Honnor, founder of Contentious, a content-led strategy practice.
For non-profits, content is the work: it informs someone about the implications of their diagnosis, supports family members through a loved one’s illness, makes the case for a particular cause or issue, or brings it to life and explains how solutions can work.
Now, shifts in technology, AI and the way platforms function mean that content is no longer simply a communication device. It has become the primary mechanism through which organisations reach people, change minds, deliver services and win campaigns. This shift is structural and operational, not just creative and my impression is that this hasn’t landed with most non-profits yet.
The shift: how people find information and how organisations reach people
The old way of doing things was to create an ad then decide who should see that ad based on demographics, interests, location and subscriptions. But tools like Meta’s Andromeda update have flipped that process upside down. Now, AI picks which ads to serve based on audience behaviour.
Chris Tan at Platypus Digital wrote about how this shift has fundamentally changed content marketing. We used to ask: “Who should see this ad?” Now, the algorithm asks: “What ads should I serve this person?” This is true audience-centricity, determined by AI, not by targeting parameters.
In a similar shift, AI-generated summaries in Google search results are replacing the traditional first page of links. This is huge. When the front door to your organisation (organic search) is being dismantled, how you reach people changes completely. The journey to conversion has moved from your website almost exclusively to social media. And traffic from search is much less within your control. Your website suddenly has a totally new audience: AI agents.
If the algorithm is using AI to make decisions and AI gets its information from content, the content you’re producing is the only way to create influence. The quality, the quantity, the format, what you say, how you say it and how you package it up. Now that we aren’t choosing our own audiences any more, this is the only way to reach the people you need and want to reach.
Media organisations know this and are responding. Reuters Institute research reports that three-quarters of publishers would be “getting journalists to behave more like creators this year.” Wired, for example, has set out a strategy to build its best-known writers into ‘platform personalities’ featuring on everything “from vertical video on TikTok and Instagram to live events.”
Johanna Rüdiger of Deutsche Welle is developing journalists into content creators: "People follow people, not institutions, and audiences often get their news from personalities and creators. So a lot of media companies now understand that they need to train journalists to become content creators.
"With the rise of AI, it's even more important that you know and trust a person, and that you build a relationship with your audience. If you're a successful content creator and you've built a real community, then you become a little bit more independent from the algorithm."
This is relevant to all organisations, but especially non-profits. Our content has a humanitarian purpose. We need it to cut through not just because it promotes our services but because it does good. Now we need to be writing not only for humans but for AI and algorithms. The good news is that simple, clear, easy to understand language works for both.
"I'm telling the news like I'm telling it to a friend.” says Johanna Rüdiger of Deutsche Welle. “I break things down. I use conversational language. As journalists, we often use very big words...So when I'm looking at scripts, I'm always very strict about asking: where is the audience? Are we talking to them authentically, at eye level? Are we telling our audience what this news means for their daily lives?"
At the Engaging Networks Community Conference 2026, Berry Cochrane and Paul DeGregorio discussed how progressive and campaigning organisations are falling behind the political Right, partially because of how we communicate. Berry concluded that we need to fight the algorithm, but we also need to work with it in its current form. Otherwise, how can we get OUR message to wider audiences
All this means that we need to change how we think about, produce and manage content. The algorithm likes a healthy dose of conflict, humour and cultural relevance for content to cut through and scale. We also need to start producing more and different versions of the message we have.
I discussed all this with my long-term colleague Julius Honnor, founder of Contentious, a content-led strategy practice: “Organisations shouldn't think of this as a battle between themselves and the big AI platforms. Many charities have deep expertise and can codify their knowledge and build specialist AI agents that are more useful than a generic ChatGPT query. There is an opportunity to create personalised, branded, high-value agentic experiences that generic AI can’t replicate.”
True audience-centricity is here
We’ve been talking about audience centricity for years. Now it’s actually happening, but at a level of precision and personalisation that makes the old model of targeting people by demographic seem clumsy.
Julius’s view: “Before, audience-centricity tended to be clunky and broad brush. Organisations were being audience-centric by demographic, which is a blunt instrument. AI enables something different: segmenting by behaviour rather than demographics, and personalisation at a scale that has been talked about for years but was never really doable until now. Hyper-personalisation, where every individual gets a different email, and can reply to it and have an AI agent respond, is a fundamentally different mode of operating.”
Many years ago, Richard Roaf, Director of VideoRev, challenged me on the value of market research audience profiles for Facebook targeting. He had already replaced demographic targeting, instead building audiences around content: creating a piece of content, finding the interest group around it, and retargeting from there. Used like this, content stops being just a comms tool and becomes a way of achieving reach far more diverse than you ever could with traditional segmentation.
The core problem: this is an organisational problem not a comms problem
So, content has graduated from an emotional storytelling tool to a core strategic product. Unless we’re talking about risk-management, most non-profits are still treating content as a social media team problem, or at best a comms director problem. But with all the changes we’ve seen this year, this is now an organisational problem.
Julius shares his thoughts: “Instead of producing some good support content and moderately engaging blog posts, organisations now have to cope with personalisation at scale, the orchestration of AI agents and humans and all the guardrails and codified knowledge that agents need to operate.” The answer, he believes, is “the concept of the content operating model. It’s a framework for how organisations produce, orchestrate and govern content.”
Can we learn from digital transformation?
The scale of change and challenge we’re facing feels akin to that of digital transformation. Can we learn from this? Can we understand what we got wrong and what to do differently?
“The first wave of digital transformation may have been less existential for charities than it was for others. Organisations could mostly get away with putting a digital layer on top of existing ways of working. This time it is more fundamental. The things being disrupted are directly tied to whether a charity succeeds or fails: content is what wins campaigns, changes minds, raises money, delivers services. Getting it wrong this time has bigger consequences,” says Julius.
The main thing we missed last time, is that change needs to be organisation wide. It needs to cover people and processes as well as technology.
One way to address this is to create senior transformation roles with a seat at the decision making table. Just as CDO roles were created to signal the importance of digital (though it took 15 years in some cases), should we start thinking about a Chief Content Officer?
According to Julius and Reuters Institute research, this role would have a very different profile to a traditional editorial background. It’s not just about writing stories. It’s a role that involves understanding the changes in how AI and content works with audiences. It’s a digital engagement role not an editorial one.
Another thing we learnt from digital transformation is that we can’t make change happen by putting it in one person's remit and one (digital transformation team) silo. We need everyone in the organisation to understand why this change is happening and develop skills that enable new ways of working. We need leadership who understands the nature of change. Because, to be strategic in making technological decisions, one needs to understand the underlying principles, and roughly how it all works. Some leaders do get this. But if they don’t, they need to be willing to hire people who do and then support them while they do the work. In summary, we need organisation-wide upskilling up and down the hierarchy.
For non-profits, content has always been essential to deliver their mission. Now, how we manage content can be the difference between visibility and decline into obscurity.
Like media companies, non-profits need to plan how they’ll adjust their people, process and, yes, tech again, in order to be able to make the right decisions and respond to these changes. And they need to do it now. The pace of change is much more rapid this time.
