Before Givora, I spent a decade helping run a software company. And for most of that decade, we did the thing every marketing article told us to do: we published. Useful articles, written carefully, week after week, year after year. Real expertise, given away free. We were proud of it.
Here's what all that work earned us: a search ranking. Google indexed us. If someone typed exactly the right question into a search bar, our answer was there waiting. That's not nothing. It brought real enquiries over the years. But it's a fraction of what the same effort should have returned, and it took me embarrassingly long to see why.
We treated publishing as the finish line. It's the starting line. Everything that actually earns attention happens after you hit publish, and we did almost none of it.
The mistake, named properly
There's a framework in the marketing world that names this precisely. It's called the PESO Model, created by communications strategist Gini Dietrich, and it says there are four kinds of media: paid, earned, shared, and owned. Strip the jargon and it's four kinds of attention your organisation can get:
- Paid: attention you buy. Ads, boosted posts.
- Earned: attention others give you. Local news, a community page sharing your story, someone else's newsletter mentioning your work.
- Shared: attention on social platforms, where your supporters pass the story along.
- Owned: attention you control. Your email and SMS list, your website.
Dietrich's sharpest observation isn't the list. It's that almost everyone picks one type, stops there, and then wonders why nothing happens. That was us. We made owned media, the blog, and let it sit, hoping search would do the distributing. The four types are meant to feed each other: the thing you make travels through shared and earned channels, gets a paid nudge where it counts, and captures people back into the audience you own. Skip the middle and you've built a library nobody visits.
And the data says my decade wasn't unusual. It was the norm. Ahrefs studied roughly 14 billion webpages and found that 96.55% of them get no traffic from Google at all. Backlinko and BuzzSumo analysed 912 million articles and found 94% earned zero external links, while just 1.3% of articles captured three-quarters of all social shares. Read those numbers together and the picture is stark: nearly everything published is never found, never linked, never shared. Not because it's bad. Because nobody carried it anywhere.
Sound familiar? It's the charity version too. The impact report that went on the website and nowhere else. The beautiful annual video, posted once. The newsletter written for the people already on the list. Making the thing feels like the work. Distributing it feels like showing off. So the making gets done and the distributing doesn't, and the community never hears about work it would gladly fund.
Where the attention actually is
What finally made this click for me wasn't a marketing book. It was watching how people, including me, actually give their attention now. Nobody goes looking for a blog. Nobody visits a website to see what's new. Attention lives in feeds: short videos and posts, delivered to people while they're already scrolling. You don't ask the community to come to your content. The feed carries your content to them.
That changes what distribution means. A decade ago, distributing our articles would have meant email and outreach. Today, the highest-leverage move is simpler and cheaper: take the one substantial thing you made, whether that's the story, the shoot or the report, and cut it into many short pieces that travel on their own. One filming day becomes weeks of short videos. Each one is a small chance to be seen by someone new; each one can tag a partner or a local voice (earned), be boosted for a few dollars where it's working (paid), and point somewhere that captures an email address (owned).
The test for any piece of content isn't "did we publish it?" It's: how many separate times, in how many places, will someone encounter this, and where does each encounter send them? If the answer is "once, on our website, nowhere" you haven't distributed anything. You've filed it.
Every road leads to the list
One more thing the four-types lens makes obvious, and it connects to something I've written about before: three of the four kinds of attention are rented. Paid stops when you stop paying. Earned and shared happen on someone else's platform, at someone else's pleasure. Owned is the only one that compounds, which means the point of the other three is to feed it. Every short video, every share, every boosted post should be quietly moving people toward the list your charity keeps. Distribution without capture is just noise that flatters you.
This thinking is built into how we structure our own work, which we call the Harvest Method, but the principle holds whether you ever work with us or not: whatever your charity makes next, plan the distribution before you plan the content. The story deserves to travel.
Dave Burkett is the founder of Givora, a managed storytelling and fundraising channel for local charities in Brisbane.