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< Resources Digital Tools

Communicate Externally

Get support with digital communications

Google Ad Grants offer eligible NGOs free advertising space on Google, allowing you to strategically display your charity’s chosen message to people who are actively searching for NGOs. Any UK-based registered charity can receive around £8,000 in AdWords advertising every month for free.

Photo Gathering

Flickr is used by lots of organisations to get their photos online – check out FCDO, EU ECHO and UN Women for starters. Many but not all of the images are free to use under creative commons, so make sure to check the license. 

4 sources of royalty-free images 

  1. pexels.com
  2. unsplash.com
  3. pixabay.com
  4. freeimages.com

Graphic Design

3 Free Tools to Help with Graphics 

Canva is an easy tool for creating graphics, and it’s all drag-and-drop so you don’t need any technical skills. It’s particularly helpful for social media, but it could also be used for event invitations, website icons or infographics. Even better, charities can have the premium version for free.

Pablo’s free for charities, and its stock images, text boxes, and content sizing are perfect those looking to immediately upload to social media. Pablo has over 600,000 images to choose from, or charities can upload their own. Once selected, images can be layered with text and customised by size for Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

Adobe Spark is an online tool for quickly creating engaging graphics with a range of features and inbuilt photos. With a range of templates from social media posts to flyers, non- designers can make professional looking graphics in minutes.

Build your own website

You don’t need to pay someone to design your website. If you want something simple you can do it yourself. 

4 free and easy website builders

Blogger, from Google, is an easy way to set up a blog based website. You do not need any web design skills and it’s free to use. 

Wix is easy to use and good for small websites where good design is important. Free packages are available.

Weebly is very easy to use and can handle larger websites. They have free options and other affordable packages. Particularly good if you are selling things.

Webnode one of the best cheap options for developing multilingual websites. One of the most globally used website builders, especially among European users. Not good if you want to sell things. Free packages available.

Social media

Social media is free and easy to use and where a lot of your audience is already.  

Learn more about social media for charities.

5 Social Media Platforms you should consider

Facebook. Popular across the UK and Africa, lots of your contacts will already be on Facebook. You can easily set up a page to promote your work and get volunteers or donations.

Twitter is good for advocacy, getting your message amplified by others, as well as networking with people and organisations around the world. 

Instagram could be the platform for you if you have great photos to share of your work. Instagram can help build engagement and drive traffic to your website.

LinkedIn is useful for building and maintaining networks of professional contacts. 

YouTube is the place to show off great videos of your work.

Editing film and audio

Edit simple film and audio clips with this browser-based editing tool: www.veed.io.