THE €100 COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT

COULD WE RUN A COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT FOR JUST €100 A MONTH

The cost of some comms activities has fallen dramatically in the past two years. We talk about how much easier it is to create content, and how human judgement is now the central skill of comms teams and leaders. But has all that translated into real cash savings for charities and nonprofits?

We set ourselves the challenge of designing a comms team to run on a crazy small budget of €100 a month. We wanted to explore where it’s still worth spending money, when the free option might actually cost more in staff time, and how much staffing power would be needed to run this super low-budget department.

The €100 target isn’t completely random. We’ve worked with micro-organisations who have only just started their comms function, operating with an average budget of around €100 a month, mainly paying for Eventbrite promotion and Facebook ads. We wanted to test whether this still holds up, whether you could do this for larger teams and organisations, and what the results and limitations would be.

Read on to learn what we discovered…

ASSUMPTIONS

First, the €100 comms team is not designed for an organisation operating at scale. If you are trying to acquire thousands of new supporters, run daily campaigns across many online platforms, or monitor public debate in detail (especially internationally), the €100 limit is already toast. This experiment is more about a small nonprofit with up to 500 important contacts, a newsletter, 2-3 active social channels and a website focused on providing information (without complex integrations or interactions like creating an account).

Second, we’re assuming the organisation already has a productivity system like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, providing email, calendars, documents, spreadsheets, file storage, forms and online meetings. We’re also assuming that there is a functioning laptop, smartphone and internet access.

Third, and most importantly, we’re assuming there is a person with communications skills. They can write, make sensible editorial decisions, understand audiences, use basic digital tools and judge whether something is good enough to publish. They have time allocated to producing and managing the comms function (even if not full time). Their salary isn’t included in the €100. But we will come back to the question of staff bill versus tech bill, because that’s an important calculation too.

So what do we spend our money on?

Our biggest technology purchase would probably be one good multipurpose AI platform. This is for research, planning, first drafts, summarising information, interrogating documents, adapting material for different channels and some basic analysis.

 1.GENERAL-PURPOSE AI TOOL: €25

As a strategic comms consultancy for nonprofits we consider it part of our job to try different new tools, so we can advise our clients on what to use. We tried out some AI agents for social media post creation and scheduling. Our top performing LinkedIn post in 2025 was conceptualised and written by an AI (though it was then edited by a human). We did not feel it was the most “on brand” post, but it had the greatest reach and engagement. But as Claude and ChatGPT improved their models, we found that these multi-purpose AI tools were better at creating content than the specialist AI agent. We still have to post manually, but that doesn’t take as much time as editing poor images and copy produced by the agent.

So with our €100 monthly budget, we’re using a good chunk on one helpful multi-purpose AI that can do a lot of the generative work. We will have to make our own designs and post content manually, however, adding to the staff time required. The Claude Pro plan is currently $25 a month and GPT Plus is $20 a month. Other AI platforms are available.

2. WEBSITE: €10

We’re giving our organisation a website. For this experiment, we’re assuming a relatively simple site: perhaps 10–30 core pages, no complicated member areas or integrations.

Hosting for a small site can start at a few euros a month. Updating the site is done in-house using WordPress or another no/low-code interface.

The budget here includes a self-hosted WordPress site, plus basic hosting and free use of Elementor or another WordPress theme. We added roughly €1–2/month averaged across the year, for the domain. Popular domain names, or multiple domains, would increase this cost.

3. CONTACTS AND EMAIL: €0

To meet the €100 budget, we have to go cheap here. This is a bit counter-cultural as many small organisations we’ve worked with have prioritised paying for a CRM like Salesforce and/or an email marketing platform like MailChimp.

For smaller organisations, a spreadsheet could be enough to manage stakeholder relationships. Name, organisation, role, category, relationship owner, last contact, next action and notes – nothing clever. When the organisation has more than around 500 active contacts, then the DIY CRM is probably not enough. Also when several people need to record interactions and manage follow-ups, it’s time for a proper CRM.

A small organisation can issue email newsletters using mail merge, already available through Google Workspace. This option doesn’t give the polished experience or functionality of a dedicated email marketing platform like Mailchimp. You also don’t get the same analytics and list-management features. But if you’re sending a straightforward monthly email to a relatively small list, this tool can do the job without eating any budget.

For the newsletter, it’s time to pay when you need to segment contact lists, automate email sequences, get analytics, or send more frequently (when the time saving compensates for the additional tool cost).

A major drawback of these free/integrated systems is that the organisation has to manage processes such as consent, unsubscribes and data deletion more manually. A dedicated email platform can automate some of this list management. For governance reasons, you might want to use the budget here sooner rather than later. It does, of course, mean that more third-party tools are handling the data of your community, which can be complex in terms of data privacy.

4.CONTENT, DESIGN, VIDEO AND DISTRIBUTION: €50

For eligible nonprofits, Canva offers its nonprofit product free. In the past few years our designer has come to recommend Canva almost every time for organisations who later want to be able to edit designs themselves, and/or who find the Adobe Suite licence fees offputting. Non-designers can also use and adapt designs from Canva’s own template libraries.

If video needs are simple (e.g. social media reels), the setup can be just a phone + free editing or design tools (or Canva’s). No need to buy stock footage, specialist editing software or new cameras as part of this experiment. But if more complex and narrative video is needed, of course the costs here would be much higher. Even a consolidated yearly underspend on the monthly budget would not stretch very far for videography.

With the tiny €100 budget we’d also avoid paying for a social media scheduling tool. Instead, we’d schedule natively on two or three priority platforms. That’s less efficient, but this would save around €20 a month that we can use for something else. Some scheduling tools allow a limited number of scheduled posts/platforms for free.

We’d keep perhaps €30–60 available for paid distribution – meaning, ads. We wouldn’t necessarily spend it every month, only when there’s a priority event or campaign. Then we could put €150 behind one important campaign every quarter, for example. And that campaign needs to be designed for a specific deliverable: registrations, newsletter subscriptions, downloads, donations or another measurable action. With a small budget, usually better to pay for a measurable action than just for reach.

5. LISTENING, MONITORING AND MEASUREMENT: €0

For website performance, Google Analytics and Search Console don’t have a separate cost centre. For social channels, we’d use each platform’s own analytics.

For media and social listening, we’d combine Google Alerts, platform searches and the research capabilities of the AI platform we’re already paying for. This has a significant limitation, though: searching for something isn’t the same as continuously listening for it. If your organisation needs rapid alerts, comprehensive media coverage reporting, or monitoring across countries and languages, the free version won’t be enough and a paid listening/monitoring platform is probably the only option that will meet your needs.

To make this category work on zero platform budget, organisations also have to prioritise a smaller number of metrics. Pick the small number of metrics or terms that tell you whether your communications are doing their job. There’s not much point saving €30 on a reporting platform and then spending a day every month manually collecting loads of metrics.

STAFF TIME: THE CRUCIAL DENOMINATOR

For this experiment, we’ve set ourselves a 3x rule: the credit card comes out when the free workaround starts costing substantially more in staff time than the paid tool. If a tool costs €20 a month, we want it to save at least €60 of staff time. If the person doing the work costs €40 an hour, that means saving at least 90 minutes a month.

This is the catch. All the cheap and free options require more manual work than paid tools. The spreadsheet CRM is free because somebody maintains it, whereas an automated CRM can integrate with your inbox and update contact logs without anyone having to think about it. Native social scheduling is free because somebody logs into each platform and pastes the information in, painstakingly selecting dates and times and adding the images and videos. And so on.

Our rule of thumb is: a paid tool should either:

    • save 3x more than its cost in staff time

    • improve an important result

    • or give us a capability we need that we can’t reproduce ourselves.

The goal here is to protect “human time” for the things technology is poor at replacing: making decisions, understanding context, interviewing people and building relationships. Technology can make communications extraordinarily cheap. What it doesn’t remove is the need for someone to decide what matters, what it means and what is actually worth saying. Meaning-making.

SO, CAN YOU RUN A COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT FOR €100 A MONTH?

Yes.

Function Monthly budget
Multipurpose AI platform €25
Website hosting €10
CRM and newsletter €0
Design and video €0 assuming free Canva for nonprofits
Social publishing €0
Paid distribution €50
Analytics, listening and monitoring €0
Total €85

That leaves €15 a month as contingency, which could add up to €180 a year for the occasional extra tool, campaign or price increase.

But €100 works because we’re making some very specific choices.

    • using tools the organisation already pays for

    • Restricting the channels and metrics we use

    • accepting some manual work rather than paying for convenience

    • spending almost half our available cash on reaching people (which does feel a bit icky considering that this is money paid to tech platforms that already monetise everyone’s content)

And we’re not including the cost of the person running all this.

WHEN €100 ISN’T ENOUGH

We need to start spending more when:

    • Your stakeholder base passes roughly 500 active contacts, especially if several people manage those relationships

    • You need rapid audience growth

    • You need hundreds of registrations, sign-ups, leads or donations each month.

    • You’re publishing daily across several channels

    • Your newsletter needs to offer segmentation, automation or fundraising/conversion

    • You need continuous media or social listening

    • Your website handles transactions, integrations or lots of content

    • Your reporting needs more than a small set of useful performance indicators.

    • You need a lot of original design, photography or video

Either way – challenge complete! This thought experiment has shown that the actual running costs (aside from staffing) for a comms department can be kept quite low, especially with a skilful staff member piloting free tools. But there are many limitations, especially when the audience and complexity start to accumulate. This means that even if starting small, organisations should plan for the comms budget to grow over time, using the benchmarks above and/or the organisation’s own goals and constraints.

A crucial part of this is valuing the skills and time of the staff member(s) involved. While tech tools can take some of the grunt work, it’s still the creativity, care and attention of a human being that makes comms effective for nonprofit organisations (and others). This thought experiment is a reminder of that, and that budget alone can’t be the only consideration in comms planning.

Now, over to you! Have you run a comms department on a tiny budget? What are your hacks? Get in touch to let us know. We will be happy to share your insights with our community of purpose driven comms specialists and organisational leaders.

Latest Post