There is a paradox at the heart of many high-impact nonprofits in India. On the ground, the work is transformative. Lives are changing, communities are more resilient, and the data is solid. Yet, step outside the immediate circle of implementation, and the organisation is practically invisible.
Leaders see the problem. The response is usually some version of the same playbook: hire a junior executive to manage social media or send the programme team to a three-day storytelling workshop.
A few months later, not much has changed. The junior hire, without strategic direction, has been consumed by operational tasks such as formatting newsletters, resizing images, and responding to ad-hoc requests. The programme team, overwhelmed by fieldwork, has had no opportunity to apply what the workshop taught them. The organisation’s visibility remains where it was. In some cases, these interventions confirm the suspicion inside the organisation: communications is not worth investing in at all.
This is not a storytelling problem. It is an infrastructure problem. Communications capability emerges from a system—one where strategy precedes execution, execution is held to a consistent standard, roles are clearly defined, and institutional knowledge is not locked in any single individual. Building that system is difficult, particularly for smaller organisations. It is worth understanding why, and what the alternative looks like in practice.
Why the current playbook falls short
Attracting and retaining strong communications professionals to a small nonprofit is hard when salaries cannot compete with the corporate sector, and the career trajectory isn’t linear.
Faced with this, most organisations reach one or two workarounds. The first is to depute someone from another function to handle communications on the side. This may solve an immediate resourcing problem, but it does not build communications capability. The cost shows over time in inconsistent output, diffused ownership, and a function that remains perpetually under-resourced.
Many boards, leaders, and funders view communications as overhead rather than a strategic function.
The second is to engage a freelance professional on a project basis. A capable person in this role can deliver competently on individual outputs, but they are responding to the system as it exists, not reshaping it. The planning deficit, governance gaps, absence of strategic direction all remain. Where internal capacity to brief, review, and direct is absent or inconsistent, the organisation continues to remain reactive, regardless of who is executing the work. A less obvious constraint is the absence of decision-making authority. Communications is a function where everyone in the organisation feels entitled to weigh in. Without a clear governance structure, these competing opinions, however well-intentioned, displace strategic thinking with subjective preference.
Underlying this is a more fundamental issue: many boards, leaders, and funders view communications as overhead rather than a strategic function. They underestimate what a consistent, well-crafted narrative does for fundraising, partnerships, and programme credibility.
Making the case to leaders, boards, and funders
This underinvestment is reinforced by the funding architecture itself. Communications fall under indirect costs, and that category is structurally underfunded in the Indian nonprofit sector. Bridgespan’s Pay-What-It-Takes India research (2021) found that 83 percent of Indian nonprofits struggle to secure coverage of indirect costs. A financial analysis of 40 nonprofits in the same study found that actual indirect cost needs averaged 19 percent of total costs. Yet, funders typically offered between 5 and 10 percent of grant funding to cover non-programme expenditures, with major programme funders averaging just 9 percent. The prevailing funder mindset, as the research characterised it, is that anything outside programme costs does not contribute to impact.
Shifting this mindset, inside and outside the organisation, calls for a deliberate case. A few moves consistently work:
- Reframe the ask: Instead of asking funders to cover ‘communications overheads’, propose a shared outcome: visibility for the issue, credible positioning for the work, and recognition for the funder’s investment. Funders are far more willing to resource a narrative that travels with their name on it.
- Show, don’t tell: Walk the board and funders through one or two concrete deliverables—a field-based story, a media placement, a donor report that actually reads well—and let the output make the argument that a slide deck cannot.
- Report on it like a programme: Track and share reach, quality of coverage, inbound enquiries, partnerships initiated. When communications outcomes sit on the same page as programme outcomes, their strategic value becomes visible.
- Make the peer case: Point to organisations in adjacent sectors whose visibility has translated into funding, talent, and policy influence. The sector learns fastest from its own examples.
This shift is the difference between communications being treated as a cost to be minimised and a capability to be built.
What does this look like in practice?
For communications to be treated as a core organisational function, it needs to be reflected in how the organisation is structured, managed, and supported. Here are some ways to think about what that looks like in practice:
1. Give communications institutional weight
Communications cannot function as an afterthought. If leadership treats it as a postscript to the ‘real work’, the team will spend its energy justifying its own existence rather than doing the job. An explicit mandate that communications is a core organisational function is needed from the executive leadership and the Board. In practice, this means a dedicated budget line for communications, a named member of the leadership team with oversight, communications outcomes as a standing agenda item in management reviews, and the communications lead included in strategic planning discussions rather than briefed after decisions have been made. These are not large organisational changes, but they signal that the function has institutional weight behind it.
2. Hire an anchor, not just a doer
The more consequential first investment is in an anchor—a mid-to-senior professional who can design the function, articulate its strategy to the rest of the organisation, and build a team over time. This need not be a full-time hire from the outset; even a part-time engagement with the right person yields more than a full-time appointment without clarity of direction.
Wordmatter’s engagement with Work Fair and Free (WFF), a research and policy organisation focused on migrant workers’ rights and dignity, illustrates what a sustained, part-time anchor can achieve. Over 18 months, Wordmatter has anchored WFF’s digital presence and begun building the groundwork for communications, even as the internal team members coordinating this work have changed. In organisations where internal ownership of communications shifts frequently, the anchor holds institutional memory and ensures continuity while internal capacity is being built. The consistency of the external anchor has meant that high attrition, a reality in most small nonprofits, has not disrupted the digital engagement or reset its progress.
The WFF engagement reflects an organisation with the foresight to invest in external anchoring even at an early stage of its communications journey. Not every small nonprofit will be able to do the same.
Senior judgement at the front of the process is worth more than junior capacity at the back of it.
For small nonprofits, where even a part-time anchor is out of reach, there are practical alternatives. Two or three like-minded organisations can share a fractional senior consultant to meet their shared needs. Sector bodies, alumni networks, and communications professionals open to pro-bono arrangements can provide structured mentorship for a defined period. A retired or between-jobs senior professional may be willing to anchor the function on a modest retainer. The principle is the same: Senior judgement at the front of the process is worth more than junior capacity at the back of it.
3. Ensure ground exposure
Communications teams that operate without regular exposure to field realities will, over time, default to producing work drawn from briefing documents and second-hand accounts. The resulting content may be competent, but it will lack the specificity that comes from having witnessed the work firsthand.
Field exposure serves a dual purpose. Beyond the quality of the content it produces, regular field presence is one of the few reliable ways a communications team can stay connected to the organisation’s ground reality. Field visits must, therefore, be built into the communications team’s calendar as a core professional responsibility. When the team spends time in the field, the relationships they build with programme staff, the understanding they develop of the communities the organisation serves, and the contextual detail they absorb, influence the quality of the narrative they produce.
Building this habit requires structure, at least in the beginning. In 2019, Gram Vikas, a nonprofit that works with rural communities to address challenges related to water, livelihoods, and governance, introduced a quarterly field visit tracker for the communications team. It was a simple system that required planned field days to be logged at the start of each quarter and reported at the end. The tracker served its purpose: Once field visits became a regular part of how the team worked, the system was no longer needed. The discipline had been internalised.
4. Extend the function beyond the communications team
In most nonprofits, the communications team lacks deep technical programme knowledge, and the programme team may lack the skills or time for storytelling. Structured cross-learning bridges this divide over time. Planned sessions where each team teaches the other a practical skill can build shared ownership of the organisation’s narrative.
Gram Vikas applied this principle at scale. Faced with the practical challenge of a three-member core team covering close to 3,000 villages, it trained 128 field staff in storytelling and documentation over two years. By the second year, field staff contributed 45 percent of all content. When the pandemic grounded the central team, field staff produced over half that year’s output. The function held because capability had been decentralised and built into the organisation.
The communications function depends on the quality of its relationship with programme staff. Programme teams are often closest to the communities and realities the organisation is trying to change. They carry the knowledge, observations, and contextual detail that give communications specificity and credibility. Strong relationships enable a continuous flow of insight. Weak or transactional relationships often leave communications abstract or generic. The function therefore requires proximity to programmes, so that it can interpret and communicate what emerges from practice.
5. Protect talent from the burnout of vagueness
Two factors consistently erode communications talent in small setups: vague expectations and resource dilution. The anchor must serve as a single point of entry for communications requests, filtering and prioritising work so that team capacity is directed towards strategic objectives.
Two further investments matter. The first is institutional memory: standard operating procedures for how content is sourced, reviewed, approved, and archived. The system must be designed to outlast any individual’s tenure. The second is a trusted network of freelancers and vendors who can be deployed across a range of deliverables and price points. A reliable external network gives a small team the reach of a much larger one.
6. Prioritise sustained support over one-off training
The sector’s dependence on short-duration workshops for communications capacity building deserves scrutiny. Without sustained follow-up, their effect dissipates within weeks. Lasting capability is built through consistent practice on the job. It develops when a senior professional works alongside the team over time on real deliverables, such as donor reports, media interactions, or navigating organisational culture. A targeted presence at critical moments is what separates embedded support from periodic mentoring.
For small organisations, this does not have to be expensive. A monthly review call with an external mentor, a peer learning circle with two or three other nonprofits at a similar stage, or structured feedback on a handful of deliverables each quarter can do the work that a one-off workshop cannot.
Mentorship is less visible than a workshop and harder to fund, but it compounds. Over months, it changes how people think about communication, not just how they execute a task.
What funders can do
The other half of this conversation belongs to funders. The nonprofits that have built credible functions have almost always done so with a funder-or a small group of funders-willing to act differently.
In practice this has meant funding indirect costs at realistic levels rather than the prevailing 5–10 percent, treating communications as a named line item rather than an overhead to be absorbed, and supporting shared resources such as senior communications mentors across a portfolio of grantees.
Most importantly, it means recognising that communications capability is built over time—spanning months or even a few years, and not in a single grant cycle. A one-off workshop may improve skill,s but sustained mentorship helps build systems and institutional muscle.
Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies offers one example of this approach. A majority of RNP’s grants are unrestricted, giving partners the flexibility to invest in communications and organisational development and not treat them as residual costs. Beyond individual grants, RNP has also invested in shared infrastructure across its portfolio, including a 17-session impact communications programme covering audience mapping, design, and public relations. Complementing this, targeted storytelling grants have helped organisations strengthen documentation systems, hire communications staff, and platform grassroots stories with greater consistency.
The model is notable because it combines three investments that are rarely made together: unrestricted funding, pooled capacity-building across grantees, and targeted support for specific capability gaps.
When funders invest in communications this way, the benefits extend beyond individual organisations. It signals to the rest of the sector that communications is a legitimate line of investment, and it makes the case for the next organisation easier to win.
Even within existing constraints, nonprofits can begin laying the foundations themselves. For a small nonprofit wondering where to begin, the sequence is less daunting than it first appears: secure a board-level mandate that communications is a strategic function, not a service; find an anchor—part-time, shared, or mentored—before adding junior capacity; and build the simplest possible system around them. Invest in mentorship over workshops, create regular opportunities for field exposure, and make the case to funders in the language of shared outcomes.
The stories are already there. What is missing is the engine to tell them.
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Know more
- Read this article to learn how funders can better support communications capacity in nonprofits.
- Learn how Gram Vikas built its communications function through sustained investment and leadership support.
