Brand marketing essentials for charities: raising awareness and encouraging empathy
Fifty2M
December 5, 2024
If people don't know about your charity and its work, and if they don't care about its cause, they then won't be able to support it and may not want to even if they do. You can fix that by investing in brand marketing, making it easier to attract supporters and donations. Learn more in this blog.
What's your problem?
Picture this: you work in a charity that does really important work in the local community where it's based, a city of 148,000 residents. You need donations to keep you afloat, but your supporter list consists of only around 3,000 people, of which just 10% routinely give donations when you ask for them. You need to increase this but your fundraisers are always an uphill battle, and you struggle to mobilise enough people to take part.
Sound familiar?
It's a common challenge for charities, especially smaller ones, whether you operate nationally, regionally, or locally.
The problem? You're not well enough known, and not enough people care. That's where brand marketing comes in.
What is brand marketing?
In general, brand marketing is a strategic approach to getting known about and known for what you do by:
raising awareness
showcasing credibility
earning trust
For charities, as well as getting seen and heard to create those all-important opportunities for your organisation to even be considered in the first place when someone is feeling generous and looking to offer support, it's also about building affinity with your cause.
Brand marketing consists of:
Developing a brand strategy: Defining your brand's values, mission, and personality
Creating a brand identity: Designing your logo, colour palette, and other visual elements
Crafting brand messaging: Developing key messages and a consistent brand voice
Content marketing: Creating and sharing valuable content that engages your audience
Social media marketing: Using social media platforms to connect and build relationships
Public relations: Managing your brand's reputation and media relations
Advertising: Paying to get seen where it counts
Why is charity brand marketing so crucial to supporter and donor acquisition?
In most mature markets, two or three brands eventually tend to dominate, gobbling-up 80-90% of market share and leaving all the others in the sector to battle it out for the remaining 10-20%.
For instance, in the UK smartphone market, its Apple, Samsung and Google.
We see the same in the third sector. There are lots of charities providing support for people living with and beyond cancer, such as Cancer Support UK. But you're more likely to have heard of Cancer Research UK, Macmillan, and Maggie's.
The reason this happens is because the organisations that rise to the top consistently invest in promoting their brands, not just what they do or, in the case of charities, their fundraising activities.
At a more local level, within a town, city, or region, some charities become better known. And, as a result, they're easier for people to recall when thinking about giving, and people also feel more of an affinity with them.
If your charity isn't spending time, effort, and money on brand marketing, it's always going to struggle to cut through and attract more supporters. Growing your donor list is going to feel grindingly slow.
This is because your charity won't come to mind easily, and few people will care about its cause. If you ask them to donate to an online campaign or to take part in a challenge event when they've never heard of you before, or if you've not given them reason to believe in your cause, not many of them will.
Brand marketing helps to warm-up your audiences first, making people more likely to be receptive to your 'asks' later on.
Charity brand marketing ideas to consider
When it comes to boosting your chances of successfully acquiring supporters, donors, and volunteers, we generally recommend the following:
Run ads using Google Ads Grant and Meta's Facebook and Instagram platforms
Done well, ads on Google (£7,500 of free spend when you successfully apply for Google Ads Grant) are a great way to get in front of people who may already be looking for a charity like yours.
The trick is to make sure you target relevant keywords and search phrases, but that you also then answer people's queries at the online destinations you send them to (e.g. don't make the mistake of just sending traffic to your homepage, actually provide useful information or advice).
Meanwhile, ads on Facebook and Instagram give you the opportunity get your brand and cause in front of audiences who might be interested, and who could be convinced to learn more with visually arresting, attention-grabbing, and thought-provoking ads. But these ads have another benefit: thanks to an evolutionary quirk in the wiring of the human brain responsible for a cognitive bias known as The Mere Exposure Effect, familiarity breeds affinity - the more someone encounters your charity brand, the more they'll come to like it and what it stands for, and it's easy and cost-effective to put ads in front of people regularly on these platforms.
Use storytelling extensively
This is the bit that moves people from simply being aware to beginning to care.
And, again, we have evolution to thank for much of it.
Humans started out by communicating with gestures, then pictures, and eventually spoken and written words. But the thread that runs through them all is the telling of stories.
Stories help us make sense of and then codify information for storage.
But they do so by attaching emotional significance to the details: for instance, a ghost story told around a campfire which startles listeners will be much easier to recall. In our ancestors, this helped ensure stories could be passed-on to others, spreading important information that might mean the difference between life and death.
Not only do those emotions boost memorability, they do something else: they influence our decisions. Some studies suggest that how we feel has an 85% influence on our decisions, with what we think contributing just 15%.
By making use of storytelling, you can appeal to people's emotional self rather than their rational self.
Be bold, do things that are unexpected
Guess what? Our brains are also designed to notice things that are different, unusual, and out-of-context.
Again, it was part of an early survival mechanism that helped keep our ancestors alive. The brain regions responsible for this are still there, but they also play a role in spotting marketing materials that are different, or random, or confusing, or somewhere unexpected.
If all your brand marketing materials stick to tried-and-tested formats and messages, they're going to blend in, so you need to make sure that you do something that ensures they stand out and command attention.
What does this kind of bold brand marketing look like for charities? A great example is the use of 'expectation violation' or 'pattern disruption' ads - imagine a video that starts by portraying a family enjoying Christmas Eve in their lovely warm house, full to the brim with decorations and festive adornments, but which suddenly transitions to show the stark reality for people sleeping rough over Christmas; that switcheroo would get people's attention, invoke emotion, and therefore get noticed and remembered.
Charity brand marketing takeaways
If you want to grow your donor pool, attract more supporters, and recruit more volunteers for your charity, you need to invest in brand marketing activities that bring your charity and its cause to wider attention, and give people reasons to support you. If you rely too heavily on just promoting your fundraisers, you're always going to find that your progress is slow and also costly.
Many charities, especially smaller ones, are not well-known and struggle to attract support due to a lack of awareness and affinity for their cause.
Investing in brand marketing to raise awareness, showcase credibility, and build trust is crucial to solving this.
Strong brands dominate in any market. Charities need to build brand recognition to compete for attention and donations.
Utilise Google Ads Grant and Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram) to help regularly get in front of new audiences, building affinity as you go.
Employ storytelling to connect emotionally with audiences.
Be bold and unexpected in your marketing to stand out.
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