The Insider Test: If People in Your Own Sector Can't Explain Your Work, Nobody Else Can

The bottom line: a friend who worked at a different NGO once asked me what a third organisation did, one in a similar field that neither of us worked at. I didn't know. That would have been forgettable, except it raised a different question right away: if I couldn't answer that about an organisation near my own field, could anyone answer it about mine?

The test

So I started asking around, friends, acquaintances, people at other NGOs, anyone who could plausibly have crossed paths with the organisation I worked for. "Do you know what we actually do?" Most gave a version of "something about the environment," or a guess built from the name alone, not the work. A few worked at NGOs in adjacent fields, close enough that they arguably should have known, and still couldn't describe it.

That stood out. These weren't strangers with no reason to have run into this kind of work. They were already inside the field, in roughly the position I'd been in minutes earlier, and the explanation still hadn't reached them.

It's called the curse of knowledge

This isn't just something NGOs do. It's a documented cognitive bias: once you know something well, it's hard to remember what it felt like not to know it, so you assume other people know more than they actually do.

Named in 1989, the bias was demonstrated clearly a year later in a Stanford study: one group tapped out well-known songs on a table, another group guessed the song from the tapping alone. Tappers expected listeners to guess right about half the time. Listeners actually got it right about 2.5% of the time. The tappers heard the full melody in their heads. The listeners only heard knocking.

An NGO describing its own work runs the same experiment for years at a time. The team hears the full melody. Everyone else just hears the tapping.

Why this matters more for ordinary people, not less

The people who really need to find and understand this work aren't other NGOs. They're ordinary people: potential donors, volunteers, neighbours, anyone who might genuinely care once they understood. If someone in an adjacent field, with far more context than an ordinary person will ever have, still can't explain it, an ordinary person has almost no chance. The insider test isn't the real audience. It's proof of how wide the gap is before it even reaches the people who matter most.

That's a different audience than the one this data measures, but the underlying pattern rhymes: McKinsey.org's Organizational Health Index, run across more than 70 nonprofits in over 40 countries, found that a mission staff actually understand, not just words in a strategy document, was one of the strongest signs of a healthy organisation. Staff at the least healthy organisations were two to three times more likely to be at risk of leaving within a year. That's internal retention, not outside awareness, but it points to the same root cause: a mission that isn't genuinely understood doesn't hold up, whether the person trying to hold onto it is inside the building or outside it.

This is the same gap, from the inside

I've written before about how NGO visibility is less about funders and more about an issue staying stuck inside a small circle of people who already know the right words for it. The curse of knowledge is the mechanism behind that gap. Organisations don't choose to leave people out. The people writing the description have simply forgotten what it's like not to already know it, so the words still assume the reader has context they don't have.

That gap has a real cost. An NGO whose own peers can't explain its work is invisible to donors, volunteers, and neighbours too, not just partners or funders. Word of mouth, the cheapest and most trusted visibility a mission-driven organisation has, depends on someone being able to repeat what you do. It also means the language gap that costs visibility online usually isn't a website problem first. The website is just one more place the tapping gets heard as knocking.

The test worth running

Ask the people closest to your sector, not the general public, to explain what your organisation does in one sentence, without using any word from your own materials. If they can't, the problem isn't reach. It's translation, and it starts long before anyone gets to a search engine.

Fixing it is closer to content strategy work than a technical fix, rewriting the same real work in language that reaches past the room it started in.