Taking big bets on your comms career
How to remain relevant in the era of cheap content
**A big bet is a focused commitment to solving a high-stakes problem where an entity believes concentrated effort and resources can deliver outsized benefits.
Since 2025, “big bets” have been a prevalent theme in the nonprofit space. Budget cuts, AI, and increased regional conflicts, have made nonprofits review their chances of surviving the present business landscape.
And look at how the largest nonprofits are responding.
Gates Foundation has kicked off a 20-year sprint, intending to spend more than $200 billion by 2045 and close its doors forever. Mercy Corps is testing stablecoins, blockchain-enabled transfers, and digital payment systems, betting on cheaper and faster delivery of humanitarian services. The Rockefeller Foundation now describes its work through “big bets” to solve major problems across areas like energy, food, health, and finance.
In short, organisations are stepping out of their comfort zones and taking bold bets on the future. This is not just good management practice, but how any entity can survive in the marketplace.
Now compare this with what I experienced a few weeks ago while speaking with a few comms colleagues.
We discussed budget cuts, AI disruption, declining media pickup of our stories, and shrinking attention spans of people. Everyone agreed the profession is changing.
Then I changed the conversation a bit. I asked what are you doing about it, and what I heard was variations of, “well we’re posting more on LinkedIn”, “we’re doing a newsletter refresh”, “we’re creating more Canva templates for staff”, or my favorite, “I’m learning to use AI more”.
And this is the contradiction.
If the world has changed and comms as a profession is also changing with it, then we’re betting too small.
The entry points of the profession are vanishing
Many comms people I know entered the profession purely on their writing skills.
NGOs would hire fresh graduates who were handy with words to help them write blogposts, op-eds and proposals. Then the workload grows. Creating and managing the social media account gets added to their plate, then launching a newsletter, then events, getting press coverage for the event, then ghostwriting speeches for the MD, then stakeholder management, and then crisis management.
This pathway has produced many senior comms people, me included.
But that entry point is nearly gone because with even the free version of ChatGPT, employers now produce dozens of articles overnight.
You might argue, “but it will sound like AI-slop”.
Yes, but here’s an important career lesson: Value is not what you believe is valuable. Value is what the person with the budget is willing to fund. And for many small NGOs, a blogpost is a blogpost, no matter how “AI” it sounds.
I’ve spoken with program leaders and managers who’ve shared with excitement how AI now does all their drafting and writing work. For NGOs who are often budget strapped, the value proposition of a hiring a “writer” is no longer obvious.
Dont get me wrong, good writing is still incredibly valuable. But being “the person who can write” is no longer enough.
Scale of the Crisis
There are also other headwinds facing the comms profession.
AI has made content cheap. I’ve said that already. A 1000 word op-ed is now one prompt away.
Newsrooms are shrinking, journalists are overwhelmed, so media coverage is actually harder to secure.
Public trust in institutions is fragile. If your NGO or nonprofit is publicly funded or partners with governments, you’re working with a trust deficit.
Audiences are harder to reach. Social media algorithms are unreliable and change every quarter so it’s harder than ever to build a corporate brand online without extreme effort.
NGO budgets are tighter. Comms teams are smaller, and when organisations do hire, the application pool is flooded with hundreds of AI optimised CVs, so hiring managers switch to hiring based on referrals.
The list goes on.
Some of these are downstream of AI. Some are just problems whose time has come.
Building your edge in the age of AI
I’ve been building with AI tools since January - I’ve built personal apps and games, hobby websites, and automated my email and curation systems.
Without mincing words, I can tell you that AI is making parts of communications work less valuable.
And that’s not something to have a meltdown over.
One of my comms mentors would say, “Businesses exist to solve problems for others but the existence of a business also guarantees that the business will keep facing its own problems. That is why they hire employees”.
And the comms employee is not there just to write the press release, no.
In fact, while the tools will keep changing, organizations will still need comms people who can:
spot crises early and help the organization avoid them, or manage them when they arrive.
build an engaged audience in a difficult or competitive industry.
bring the imagination and creative judgment needed to stand out in a sea of AI sameness.
sell something clearly and persuasively, whether it is an idea, a physical product, or a mission.
I encourage you to make it a practice to speak with leaders often, interviewing them on their most pressing challenges. The old career paths are fading away (remember the writer example I shared earlier?); you need to gather new career intelligence so you can map your own journey.
So let’s move to the strategic bets:
Bet #1: Become commercially useful
Comms people especially in the nonprofit space often get trapped in output mode: publishing blogs, designing flyers, posting to socials, sending newsletters.
Today, anyone using AI can do all the above with the push of a button.
You must start thinking of the true value of comms and your role in it:
Can I grow an audience?
Can I shift sentiment positively towards an institution?
Can I influence people to act? It could be buying something, donating money, signing up for a cause etc.
Can I spot, anticipate and reduce risks?
Can I sell a difficult idea?
Pick one, it doesnt matter which, and become the best person in the nonprofit space at it.
For example, in the attention economy, building an audience is now an existential need for organizations and businesses.I’m not talking about “going viral,” but building a consistent connection with people who keep the organization in business, be it funders, customers or partners.
For comms professionals, being highly skilled in audience-building today is a career moat. Someone who can turn expertise into a following, a community, or a media presence is extremely valuable. Either you’ve done this for an NGO before or you’ve been able to build your own audience. Either one signals commercial value to an employer.
Bet #2: Get specific and specialise
Domain expertise builds up your capital in 2 dimensions - skill and reputation.
Employers do not hire abstractly, rather they hire to solve a problem within their organization or industry.
A research organization wants someone who can translate evidence without distorting it. There is a reason many of the best-known science communicators are scientists themselves.
Hiring an industry expert who’s also a skilled communicator beats hiring a generalist comms person. Domain expertise has always been an advantage and will be even more important in the coming years.
I used to tell my mentees that a comms person is a problem solver. But I have started to edit that line. The future-proof communicator is not just a general problem solver. They are problem solvers with domain fluency.
A simple way to make this mental shift - imagine you’re a fixer (like Olivia Pope in Scandal) and organisations only call you when they have problems. What type of phone calls would you be receiving?
If it’s still generic, you’re not being strategic with your career. You should aim to receive calls like:
“We are entering a difficult public conversation and need to avoid reputational damage. We heard you’re an Issues and Reputation Strategist who knows how to manage sensitive moments.”
“We need policymakers to understand and use our evidence. Someone told me you’re a Policy Engagement Communications expert, and this is your bread and butter.”
“We want our experts to become more influential in our industry. We heard you’ve built credible online profiles for some experts in this field.”
The job title is not as important as the problems that need solving.
Build a reputation for solving specific comms problems within specific industries. Go deep in that thing, deeper than anyone else.
That’s the career bet.
Your positioning must be specific, at the edges of AI capability and truly valuable to organisations in your industry.
Bet #3 Abandon job title thinking
Job titles decay.
“Social media manager,” “content marketing manager, “Creator Partnerships Lead” etc did not exist 25 years ago.
Many comms people today barely use newswires, even though newswires were a mainstay of the profession three decades ago.
Now, it’s happening again - the tools, the channels and job titles are changing at the same time.
It doesn’t make sense to build your career aiming for a specific job title that may not exist in a few years. Instead, build it around problems that organisations will still have:
creating demand for their products and services
spotting and managing reputational risk early
leaders unable to explain complex ideas and build strong relationships with their audience
institutions with a trust deficit, struggling to earn the attention and trust of the public
technical employees with limited industry influence despite having the expertise
This type of positioning also opens you up to pathways that are connected to communications, but not always seen as core comms: partnerships, events, policy engagement, and advocacy (the real kind, not the type that is just managing a social media account).
Communications is about helping organizations build the relationships they need to survive and grow. Sometimes that relationship is with customers. Sometimes it is with regulators, funders, policymakers, partners, or the public.
Great content can do a lot. But great content plus other adjacent tools, like partnerships, convenings, campaigns, and coalition-building, can do much more.
A good communicator who can also build partnerships will rarely be out of a job.
“Build human capital that AI cannot replicate like “client relationships, institutional knowledge, management capabilities, or the ability to walk into a room and make shit happen.” ~Mark Ritson.
The problem I see is many people are crippled with the fear of, “What will AI do to communications?”
I believe it’s the wrong question.
What you should be thinking deeply about is, what problems have businesses always had and what new problems is AI introducing? That is the right instinct.
As the tech gets better, your career will be determined by your skill level and reputation.
The question I will leave you with is, are you willing to make a big bet on the kind of professional you need to become?
Epilogue
What skills are employers demanding from comms people?
I collected every comms job that crossed my feed for 7 months. I wanted to stay up to date on job trends and insights on what skills are indemand, what tools are mentioned, and compare salaries. When you lay 103 JDs side by side, patterns emerge. Some confirm what you’d expect but there were genuine surprises.
The carousel with the insights is here.
The dataset itself is here (download and run your own analysis).
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