Before you plan 2027, take an honest look at your charity's social media
Most charity social media plans for a new year start with a content calendar. I'd start somewhere else: with last year's numbers and a few awkward questions about them.
You won't be alone in wanting to get this right. The Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 heard from a record 807 organisations and found that 36% of charities now see developing a social media strategy as a priority, up from 25% the year before. Around a third want to get better at monitoring and evaluating how their social media performs.
For small charities the gap is usually time rather than will. The previous year's report found 68% of small charities were still at the early stages with digital. So here's a review a small team can realistically do in an afternoon or two.
Start with who you need to reach
Before you open any analytics, write down the three or four audiences that matter most to your charity in 2027. Donors, volunteers, service users, local businesses, funders. Short snapshots are enough.
Then compare that list with who is actually engaging. Look at follower demographics, who comments and who shares. Are the people you need there at all? A mismatch here matters more than any engagement figure.
While you're at it, list every account you have, including the ones nobody has touched since 2023. Google your charity's name and see which profiles come up. Dormant accounts still represent you.
Rethink what you measure
Platforms hand you plenty of numbers. Most describe what happened on the platform, which isn't the same as whether social media is helping your charity. Before you pull a single figure, it's worth reviewing what you've been counting and why.
Metrics are the raw numbers platforms give you, such as reach, likes and followers. KPIs are the few measures you've chosen because they show progress towards a specific goal.
It helps to think in three layers. Activity is what you did, such as posts published and hours spent. Engagement is how people responded. Outcomes are what changed off the platform: a volunteer enquiry, an event sign-up, a donation or a local business asking about sponsorship. Many reports stop at engagement. Outcomes are where the meaning is.
Then look at who is engaging, not only how many. Fifty likes from other charities count for less than five comments from local employers if businesses are the audience you need. LinkedIn page analytics break down your followers and visitors by job function, seniority, industry and location, and Facebook gives a rough picture of age and location.
Count the conversations too. Messages, enquiries, tags and comments that ask a question are some of the best signals a small charity has. Platforms don't put them in a dashboard, so a simple monthly tally does the job.
Put a cost against each platform. Hours spent set against outcomes achieved is the number that tells you whether to keep, tweak or stop. It rarely makes it into reports. It should.
Close the tracking gaps where you can. Adding UTM tags to the links you share lets Google Analytics show which platform sent people to your donate or volunteer pages.
None of this means ignoring reach. If awareness is a genuine goal, for a new service or a local campaign, reach is a fair KPI. The mistake is reporting it as success in itself.
For a small team, one outcome per goal and two or three supporting numbers is plenty. A twelve-line dashboard rarely gets acted on.
Question the numbers before you act on them
This is where a lot of audits stop too soon.
Benchmarks are less reliable than they look. Published figures for a "good" charity engagement rate vary widely depending on who calculated them and how. Your own trend over 12 months tells you more. If you do compare, compare with charities of a similar size.
Engagement isn't the same as support. A post can collect plenty of likes and bring in no volunteers. Check whether your busiest posts led to anything off the platform.
Some of your impact won't show up at all. A post shared in a WhatsApp group or mentioned at the school gate leaves no trace in your analytics. Ask new supporters how they heard about you. It's simple and it fills the gaps.
And last year may not predict next year. Ofcom figures, cited in Enthuse's 2026 Charity Pulse report, show the number of UK adults using X fell from 24 million in 2023 to 19.4 million in 2025. A falling graph might be about the platform rather than your content.
A worked example: swapping X for LinkedIn
Here's how this can play out for a small local charity.
Picture a community charity with two part-time staff and a handful of volunteers, posting on Facebook, Instagram and X. The review shows X engagement has been sliding for two years. Very few posts lead to clicks, and the people who do engage are mostly other charities rather than donors or volunteers.
There's a values question too. Trustees have raised concerns about the content their posts sit alongside on X. They're not the only ones. Mind, ACEVO and the Charity Finance Group are among the sector organisations that have left, with CFG saying the platform no longer aligned with its values.
The audience review also shows a gap. The charity wants more support from local firms, through volunteering days, sponsorship or payroll giving, but nothing in its social mix reaches business owners or the people who run community programmes.
So the team makes two decisions. They stop posting on X, pin a final post pointing followers to their other channels and keep the handle so nobody else can use the name. Then they move those hours to LinkedIn, with a company page and the CEO posting regularly from their own profile about the charity's work in the area.
The KPIs change with the platform. On X the team had tracked followers and likes. On LinkedIn they track connection requests from local business people, enquiries about volunteering or sponsorship and invitations to speak at networking events.
The point isn't that every charity should leave X. Plenty of charities still use it, including well-known names. The point is that the decision came out of the review: the audience they needed wasn't there, the time wasn't paying back and trustees had a values concern they could explain.
Turn findings into keep, tweak or stop
For each platform, make a call: keep, tweak or stop. Stopping is a perfectly good outcome and often frees up the time to do one platform well.
Then choose three to five KPIs for 2027. Any more and they won't get looked at.
Finally, check your social media policy still reflects how you work. In England and Wales, the Charity Commission expects charities that use social media to have one, covering who has access to your accounts and how they're kept secure. A platform change is a good moment to update it.
Information sources if you want to read a little more:
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on your charity's social media before you plan for 2027, book a free 30-minute chat at bluelizardmarketing.com. No obligation, just a conversation.
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