Somewhere in the country this autumn, a charity board will approve a marketing job description.
It will list social media, email, website updates, the newsletter, event promotion, some design work, a bit of press, and probably fundraising support. It will ask for three to five years of experience and offer a salary that reflects what the budget can bear rather than what the role demands.
The person appointed will be capable and well intentioned.
Six months later they will be exhausted, the board will be quietly disappointed, and someone at a trustee meeting will observe that marketing does not seem to work particularly well in this organisation.
The job description was never the solution.
It was the symptom.
What the job description is telling you
When an organisation cannot articulate what its marketing needs to achieve, the vacancy becomes the plan.
Everything that has been left undone gets written into the person specification, and the assumption is that the right hire will sort it out.
This is not a failure of care. It is what happens when there is no diagnosis to work from.
The Charity Digital Skills Report 2026 found that only 28% of charities have a digital strategy in place. It also found that 51% of charities cite a lack of headspace and capacity as a barrier to digital progress, while 63% say squeezed organisational finances are their biggest barrier.
The picture is particularly difficult for smaller organisations. The report shows that only 37% of small charities consider developing a digital, data or technology strategy a priority, compared with 65% of large charities.
Small charities are not necessarily choosing to work without a plan.
They are often working without the capacity to make one.
Read those findings together and a pattern emerges. The organisation knows something needs to change. It does not have the space to work out what.
So it advertises a role, because a role feels like progress and a diagnosis feels like a delay.
The cost of guessing
Recruitment is expensive even when it works.
Research from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation found that 85% of HR decision-makers admitted their organisation had made a bad hire. It also found that a poor hire at mid-manager level, with a salary of £42,000, could cost a business more than £132,000 once wasted training, lost productivity and increased turnover were taken into account. UK businesses were also failing to hire the right person for two out of five roles.
Those figures come from the commercial world, where budgets are larger and the tolerance for error is greater.
Apply the same logic to a charity where the marketing salary is a meaningful proportion of unrestricted income and the picture becomes rather more serious.
A mis-specified role is not just a wasted appointment.
It is a year of unrestricted funding spent on the wrong shape of help.
And the cost is not only financial.
The person who takes that role inherits an impossible brief. They are being asked to be strategist, producer, designer and analyst at once, usually with a small budget and several trustees who each have a firm view about which channel matters most.
When it does not work, the conclusion drawn is rarely that the brief was wrong.
Work out the job before you write the job description
The useful question is not who do we need?
It is what has to be true in twelve months, and what work does that require?
Answering it properly means looking at what is already happening.
Where does support currently come from, and does anyone know?
Which activities produce results and which continue because they always have?
What does the website do for the organisation beyond existing?
Where is the same effort being duplicated across three channels because nobody has decided which one matters?
It also means looking hard at the tech stack, which is the part most often skipped.
The tools an organisation already owns shape what any appointment will be able to do. If the CRM does not talk to the email platform, whoever arrives will spend their first year moving data between systems by hand rather than building anything.
If donations, enquiries and event bookings sit in three unconnected places, no hire will be able to demonstrate what marketing returns, because the evidence does not join up.
And if the organisation is paying for licences nobody uses, that budget may be better spent than on a salary.
The tech stack question also changes the shape of the role.
A charity with a well-configured CRM and connected reporting needs someone who can think, because the plumbing works.
A charity without one needs someone with different skills entirely, or it needs the plumbing fixed before it recruits at all.
Those are two very different job descriptions, and the difference is invisible until somebody looks.
We have set out how to approach that decision in How to Choose a Marketing Tech Stack, and why tools so often go unused in Why Your New Marketing Tool Isn’t Being Used.
This is unglamorous work and it takes a few weeks rather than a few hours.
But it produces something a job advert cannot, which is clarity about the real shape of the gap.
Sometimes the answer is indeed a permanent hire, and the diagnosis makes that hire far more likely to succeed because the brief is real.
Often the answer is different.
It might be that the existing team needs skills rather than replacement, which is a case we have made elsewhere in When Training Beats Hiring.
It might be that what is missing is not capacity at all but direction, and that a few days a month of senior thinking would achieve more than a full-time generalist.
What trustees should be asking
Before approving a marketing appointment, a board is entitled to ask three questions.
What specific outcome is this role responsible for, expressed as something other than activity?
If the answer involves counts of posts, emails or events, the outcome has not been defined.
What did the diagnosis find?
Not what does the team think, but what evidence was gathered about where marketing effort currently goes and what it currently returns.
What did we consider instead?
A permanent hire is one option among several. If it is the only one that was examined, it was not really a decision.
None of this is an argument against employing marketers.
Charities need marketing people and the sector is full of very good ones.
It is an argument against using recruitment as a substitute for the thinking that should precede it.
The uncomfortable part
There is a reason organisations skip the diagnosis, and it is not laziness.
A diagnosis produces findings, and findings create obligations.
It might reveal that a favoured channel is not working, or that a long-running activity generates almost nothing, or that the real constraint is a leadership one rather than a resourcing one.
Those are difficult conversations to have in a room where everyone is already stretched and everyone is already doing their best.
A job description creates no such obligation.
It is a plan that nobody has to disagree with.
That is precisely why it so rarely works.
If you are weighing up a marketing appointment and want to understand the shape of the gap first, a marketing audit or a period of fractional CMO support will tell you more than another round of interviews.
It is also worth reading our comparison of a fractional CMO and an outsourced marketing department, because the two solve genuinely different problems.
