When an NGO grows past one country, I can usually tell you what breaks first in its communications. It is not the strategy and it is not the logo. It is the capacity of the people in the country offices to deliver the campaigns the organization now needs.

Here is what I have learned from working with NGOs, coalitions and foundations across Africa about keeping communications strong as you scale, and where the money usually goes wrong.

What breaks first

Sitting in New York, London, Paris or Seattle, there are things we take for granted about what communications staff should be able to do. Take good field photos. Shoot a short video. Know that the images you need for the web are not the images you need for print or for social. For most local staff, these are not skills they have been given. Without real and consistent training, the system breaks.

Headquarters may be running the social media accounts and waiting for content to arrive. In the field, people are working on iPads and old smartphones. But the tools are not the main problem. The skills are.

I saw this when I developed a communications strategy for Namati, an international organization with country offices around the world. Beyond the Freetown office are the people who go out into the provinces and last-mile communities. They work in the middle of the day, under a bright, harsh sun, often with no tree cover. It is very hard to get a good photograph at that hour. If you have never been taught about light, you will not understand why your pictures keep coming back as silhouettes, or with heavy shadows across people’s faces.

And the person in New York keeps receiving the same kind of images, without understanding why, because they have never been in the field in Sierra Leone.

One message, many contexts

In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I worked for the COVID-19 Action Fund for Africa, a coalition that grew to 30 organizations reaching health workers in 18 African countries, anglophone and francophone, and I believe one lusophone. I told part of that story for the UN’s Africa Renewal: “Community Health Workers: The Unsung Heroes in Africa’s COVID-19 response”.

We kept one voice by keeping one key message: community health workers were at risk, which meant public health services were at risk. Most community health workers are unpaid volunteers, and they are the first line of defense. If they could not get protective equipment, health services would break down in the remote communities that needed them most. Until that campaign, community health workers were not really seen as a key part of the pandemic response. The message was simple: protect them.

Language matters less than people think. Once a story travels from the village to the city and beyond, it has to be translated anyway, or nobody can consume it.

What really changes from one country to the next is the political context. NGOs often fill gaps where government should be providing a service and is not, or not adequately. Some governments are very sensitive about how that gap is described. Now that everyone is online, a story about an education gap in a remote community can land badly with the central government, and that can come back to hurt your organization.

So keep one key message across every country and every program. But understand the cultural and political context wherever you work. You won’t always be able to use the same kind of language, but you can keep the message.

Narrow your focus

Schools for Salone raised more than $1 million in 2025, the first million-dollar year in its history. Year in, year out, what makes the difference is how we talk about the evolving scope of the work.

2025 was a year of disruption in global aid. New US foreign policy and the closure of USAID left a world that, at the level of states, was turning away from giving. So we talked about the new gaps this created, about how the work continues regardless, and about how far each individual donor’s contribution can go.

The biggest shift was in how we described where we work. In earlier years we talked about rural communities and villages. In 2025 we found our voice and fully embraced the last mile: places that are cut off from the big towns when the rains are heavy, places that are hard to reach, places where children struggle to get to school because of the distance. Where we work is where no one else will go. That narrative resonated deeply with our community.

Our Giving Tuesday appeal was titled “The 14-Mile Barrier is Broken.” It told the story of Koromasilaia, a remote village in Falaba District. To reach senior secondary school, students there walked 14 miles a day or paid about $1.50 for an okada to Kabala, in families living on less than $2 a day. In October 2025 the community’s own senior secondary school opened. That is what the last mile looks like, and donors could see it.

The lesson is not only about naming a place. It is about narrowing your focus. Just saying you work on education is not enough. You need to hone in, on a geography, a project, a specific need, until people know exactly what you do and where.

Show the people doing the work

Local NGOs often focus so much on beneficiaries that they forget to show who is reaching them. Someone dedicated is doing this work, someone willing to go beyond the last mile to deliver the project a donor is funding. That person is part of the story.

At Schools for Salone, that person is Clinton Caulker, our Project Coordinator and, in his own words, the Chief of Education at the Last Mile. In our 2025 year-end appeal we put him at the centre of the story: more than six years connecting remote communities in Koinadugu and Falaba to quality education, and one message he carries across the backroads of the North: “Sierra Leone’s future will not be bright if we leave last-mile children behind.” Donors met the man doing the work, not only the children receiving it.

International donors also want to see local knowledge and expertise. They want to learn from what is on the ground: the cultural practices that already advance the work and that a program can build around. They love to see that it is not a vacuum, that people in these places already have their own ways of doing things, and that the work builds on and supports them.

And widen the frame. Too often we go straight to ground zero, where the project is happening. There is a missed opportunity to step back and show the community as a whole, what life is like there. That humanizes a place and gives far more context than another close-up at the project site.

Tell the story, then show where the money is going

My Covid-19 Dignity Project raised $60,000 in seven weeks for frontline health workers in Sierra Leone, including deliveries of medicine and equipment to the Bo and Kenema government hospitals. Two rules made the difference, and I would give them to every NGO.

The first is human interest. A snapshot of someone’s life, of someone doing the work despite the odds, is the most natural story an NGO can tell. People saw the doctors and nurses in Sierra Leone doing the work, heard what it was like on the front lines of a global pandemic, and what it was like to be forgotten. The message was: don’t forget these people. They are the ones providing the service.

The second is accountability, at speed. If you are raising money directly from the public, put as much energy into showing how the money is used as you put into telling the story. The public has been burned, maybe not by you, but by other projects and other fundraisers. Larger NGOs usually wait for the end-of-year report. Don’t. As the money comes in, put it to work in the community and come back to show it: the story I told you on Monday, two weeks later, here is what we did with what you gave.

People love to see cause and effect. NGO structures do not always make it easy, but keep coming back within the month: this is how much you gave, and this is what we are doing with it, while it is still fresh in people’s minds. That is how you win support that lasts.

Where NGOs waste money

This one is easy, especially in Sierra Leone. NGOs waste a lot of money flying in videographers and “comms people”. I have seen it again and again with large international organizations: they would rather hire expats or fly people in, at a cost of thousands and thousands of dollars, sometimes for a single documentary. For that same $20,000 or $30,000, you could hire and train people locally, and your money would go so much further.

Part of the problem is that communications is not treated as high-level, skilled work. Put those funds into hiring and training a local team instead, and you get long-term support that does not leave when the contract ends.

The second waste is the long documentary. The way people consume media has changed. Unless you are submitting to film festivals or taking a film on the road for screenings, a long documentary does not make sense anymore. If social and digital media are your main channels, prioritize short-form content.

One thing to do this quarter

This may sound a little forward, but if an NGO director could do one thing this quarter, it is this: think of yourself as a content creator.

What can you create over the next three months that shows the work you do, the expertise you have, the people who benefit, and the gap or need in your sector? Choose one platform. Facebook works, but I would recommend LinkedIn. Even a weekly series is enough: a personal look at the work, how you do it, who you do it with, and the problem you are solving, always in line with your organization’s message.

The key is to see yourself as an agent of change who uses your platform to mobilize support and resources for the work. Don’t wait for the comms team, or whoever has been designated, to do it for you. That one shift can revitalize your organization, how people see it, and the work itself.