Culture: the soundtrack of a charity
Culture is often treated like background music in an organisation: always playing, but rarely the focus. When charities set out to transform how they work, especially in response to digital change or funding pressures, culture tends to be mentioned in relation to our other themes like skills, user centricity, data, or strategy - but not always in its own right.
I’ve been in small charities where we’ve succeeded in raising millions with just volunteers and a limited budget. I’ve also seen other juggernauts fail to get a pilot product off the runway despite a rigorous product strategy. So if you have everything in place - the skill set, the strategy, the tech stack - why does one succeed where the other fails?
Time and again, both in-house and as a Strategy Lead at Platypus Digital, I’ve observed that it’s the cultural stuff that makes or breaks change.
That’s why I was so excited to get stuck into culture and mindset, one of the key themes that has emerged from our research for The New Reality 2.0. I wanted to explore why culture matters, how it shows up, and why it’s such a powerful amplifier.
How can can stop treating it as an afterthought, and start seeing it as a vital part of meaningful change?
“I think that fundamentally you need to have a really positive culture in order for change to happen. If you don't start there, then it's probably not going to be as successful as it would have been.”
Lauren Plüss, Ex-Head of Digital and Content, Kinship
How culture shows up
Culture isn’t about team socials or values stickered on your wall. It’s an invisible engine: the shared habits and behaviours that shape how people show up day to day, especially when there are no formal rules guiding your work. So how do you identify the culture?
Start by looking at:
How people treat each other. Do people speak positively about each other in private? Do they champion and support each other? Or do they focus on their own goals?
How decisions are made. Do team members feel trusted to use their judgment, or do they need to check everything with eight other people first?
How disagreement and conflict are handled. Do people avoid it altogether? Do they feel comfortable sharing their opinion, even if they get pushback? Can they challenge each other and reach a constructive compromise?
How they respond to pressure and risk. Do they shut down and complain? Do they ask questions? Do they work together to find a solution, or do they tackle it individually? Who leads the charge?
How they share wins and losses. Are wins celebrated as a team? Are losses acknowledged privately and then forgotten? Do teams learn from failure?
When things get stuck, the instinct is often to tackle it through individual development – more training and coaching, a clearer strategy, more structured feedback, or updating decision-making processes.
But if the underlying culture isn’t addressed, it’s a bit like putting a plaster on a bruise.
Protecting the culture
Not every workplace culture needs to be corrected. Many of the charities I’ve worked with already have a strong, values-driven culture that’s part of what makes them effective. But even the healthiest cultures need protection during periods of change.
Transformation can unintentionally chip away at the things people value most – trust, autonomy, collaboration, a sense of shared purpose. When the focus shifts to speed, efficiency or scale, you risk sidelining the behaviours that support growth in the first place.
That’s why it’s important to treat culture with intention. Name what matters. What do we want to protect? What makes this team feel like a team? What are the behaviours we value, and how do we reward and encourage them? What happens when someone acts in ways that are opposed to our culture?
These things might not appear on a strategy slide, but they’re threaded into how your team works together. Recognising and holding onto them is a crucial strategic step that helps ground your transformation in real behaviours.
Culture is what makes transformations stick
Charities are always being asked to do more with less. To move faster, to be more innovative, to raise more money. But to grow, you can’t keep doing the same thing you’ve been doing and hoping it’ll be more successful. Something has to change along the way.
You can have the clearest roadmap, the best tools, and a solid strategy. But the culture also needs to supports your team to act, adapt, and learn.
The most effective cultures aren’t relentlessly positive or free of conflict. They’re more likely to be grounded, reflective and adaptable. They have clear norms and shared behaviours, but also enough psychological safety for people to challenge each other, reflect honestly on mistakes, hold each other accountable, and move ahead as a team. When faced with new challenges, the teams rally and lean on one another to push toward goals.
That’s what helps change take root and keep growing, long after the consultants (me!) have packed up.
Culture doesn’t have to happen by accident
Often, we treat culture like something that just happens when the right people are in the right roles at the right time. But when culture boils down to luck, it’s vulnerable to being lost.
Culture is one of the hardest things to surface as a consultant. People don’t always think about their culture, or they can’t find the words to describe it. But it shows up quickly in the way people talk about their work.
Every organisation has a culture, whether it’s named or not. Some are fast-moving and experimental. Others are cautious and consensus-driven. There isn’t such thing as a right culture – just one that’s fit for your purpose. And it’s important you treat it with intent.
“You have to keep finding multiple ways to reinforce a really positive message… to walk the talk yourself so [your team] have got something that they can see and feel and touch.”
Adeela Warley, CEO, CharityComms
Culture comes to life in your day to day interactions
Platypus Digital has its own values as a company, but I’ve also picked some that I hope to build in the teams I work with every day. I value honesty, trust, collaboration, collective ownership, and enthusiasm, so I ensure that these values are upheld in every conversation I have with my teammates.
We are honest and transparent. Mistakes as an unavoidable consequence of growth, and an opportunity to learn what not to do next time. Taking ownership of my mistakes helps create the psychological safety that the team needs to acknowledge and grow from mistakes.
We lead with trust. A really important piece of advice I received early in my career was that a manager's job isn’t to be the best person in the room: it’s to clear the way for the best people. I give my teams the brief and trust them to do the best work they can. We quick to help each other out, we delegate openly and share the load.
We reduce hierarchies. Hierarchies can help to streamline communication and decision-making, but they can also trap confidence, creativity and empowerment behind rigid systems of rank. Everyone takes turns to chair team and client calls regardless of role or seniority. And we don’t delegate tasks based on seniority, but on availability, skill set, interests and development goals.
We win, learn and grow as a team. We have a weekly issues list which team members add problems, ideas or FYIs to, then discuss them in our weekly calls. We use this space to share ideas, suggestions, opinions or disagreements. The trust the team has in each other has allowed this to become a really productive and collaborative space.
We find ways to connect and collaborate. The paid social team is located all over the country, from Folkestone to Edinburgh. Hybrid working has limited some of the exposure to conversations, decisions and opportunities that happen more naturally when you’re in an office. To replace this, we’ve implemented optional co-working sessions every Friday where the team can sit in a ‘virtual’ room to chat, hang out and work.
We reward the team’s enthusiasm, not their wins. If someone’s had a great idea, has made a particularly concerted effort on something, has gone out of their way to help a team member or client, or has tackled a new challenge for the first time, we shout them out. We give credit where it’s due. To me, their effort is more important than whether they’ve smashed a campaign target.
I try to speak openly about our values, attribute success to the rituals and norms that make us a strong team, and acknowledge how culture influences our success.
“We've been really intentional with the way we build a collaborative culture. Our weekly co-working sessions are a great example of this! They help us foster a regular social space, which can be difficult in a remote context, and a place to ask silly questions or check in on the team temperature. But they're also a great time to get together and solve problems, or discuss our approach to a big sector issue. We sometimes just share our expertise - running tutorials on project setup. I've seen "let's go through it on the co-working call," snowball into a discussion with multiple action points so many times! Having a regular, shared team space like this helps us to get to know one another, work more effectively as a team, and shapes the way we see each other.”
Chris Cottell, PPC Executive, Platypus Digital
What you can do now
The good news is that culture can be approached methodically – just like strategy. You might start with:
Defining what a healthy, useful culture looks like
Recognising and rewarding the behaviours that support it
Trusting people to lead by example
Paying regular attention to how it’s holding up
Building cultural reflection into 1:1s and team reviews
Eleanor Gibson (founder and agile coach at Tilt) and I have been hard at work analysing over 40 interviews with leaders and thinkers around the industry, trying to understand what makes transformation stick. Check out our findings, and more data-informed, insight led tips at our toolkit!
