Donna-Michelle White
Senior head of marketing
The King’s Trust
After starting as a communications officer at The King’s Trust in 2013, Donna-Michelle White made the switch to marketing a year later. She has gone on to play an instrumental role in the charity’s marketing strategy, leading a brand refresh and repositioning the organisation for a youth market.
The refresh resulted in increased acquisitions to the organisation’s youth programmes and courses, with the marketer also supporting a wide range of fundraising campaigns.
Over the past decade, White says the biggest change she’s seen is the fact “marketing no longer orders from a set menu”.
“All campaign plans are bespoke because nothing happens by chance. I've learnt to ask for as much detail as possible, while feeling comfortable to fill in the gaps with my best guess and adapt accordingly,” she says. She believes “experimentation, creativity and a little joy” are key and sees “creating the biggest impact at the lowest cost” as her biggest challenge.
“When it comes to marketing it pays to understand what's happening and why, and that requires you to ask questions.”
“When I discuss cost, I don't just mean the financial spend on achieving a particular result, but the amount of effort taken by individuals or teams to achieve goals,” she explains. “With fluctuating algorithms, how sustainable is it to continue investing in some 'business as usual' projects? Defining robust success metrics, and landing this with non-marketers within your organisation, is key to continuously evidencing marketing's long-term value.”
White believes “involving your audience” in work, particularly through research, is the biggest opportunity that marketers should be embracing.
“Doing this takes time and provides space for conflicting feedback that often goes against the grain of where you want or expect to end up, but can be highly rewarding and an effective way to bring different parts of the organisation together to make fundamental improvements to ways of working,” she explains.
Outside of The King’s Trust, White uses her role to champion equality, diversity and inclusion in the industry. While hosting her own blog on LinkedIn, ‘Prime Time’, she also appears on podcasts to discuss youth marketing and is a member of CharityComms.
White believes “we're at the start of using marketing to harness and amplify public opinion to influence society”, and audiences are becoming more savvy due to the “rise of influencers and access to technology”.
To those starting out in marketing, White advises to “stay curious, know your story and persevere”.
“When it comes to marketing it pays to understand what's happening and why, and that requires you to ask questions,” she adds.
