Charity Brand Awareness: Strategies for Non-Profits to Build Recognition

But a strong charity brand can’t bring success on its own — brand awareness is what makes a brand the go-to option for donors, volunteers, collaborators, and sponsors. Take Cancer Research UK: its marketing communications are a frequent feature on TV, online channels, and more. Its slogan, “Together, we will beat cancer” is familiar around the country, and millions of people have taken part and supported its annual Race for Life since 1994. It’s now one of the top 10 charities for income in the UK.

But, Cancer Research UK has had 120 years to build up that level of awareness in the British public. If you’re a newer, smaller, or just a less well-known charitable organisation, you’ll be wondering how you can reach similar heights.

So, stay with us and learn how non-profits can build that all-important brand awareness through marketing strategy, brand strategy, and more.

Understanding the basics of charity branding

Creating a strong brand in the charity sector involves the following:

• Identifying your mission and values: What you stand for, work towards, and believe is the beating heart in the middle of every charity brand. It will inspire and align your visuals, tone of voice, and all of the content and fundraising campaigns you put into the world.
• Locking in your audience: Having a deep and authentic understanding of your target audience is key. These are the people you’re appealing to for support and engagement, and the people you aim to help. These groups can often overlap, too.
• Building a strong voice and a distinct brand identity: Knowing how you talk to your audience and what your brand looks like, from your logo to your typography, helps you distinguish yourself, connect to your audience, and bring your purpose to life.
• Telling your story: The work in the third sector is powered by human stories, experiences, struggles, triumphs, and emotions. Channel what brought your charity into being in your brand and how you’ve changed the world for the better to build powerful and lasting connections at all levels of your organisation.

Of course, there’s much more to it than that. If you want to learn more about charity branding, head over to our complete charity branding guide.

Your mission and vision working together

Your mission encompasses your reason for being and what you want to achieve as a charity. It’s why you’re here and what you want to do. It should be clear, concise, and easy for people to understand and buy into. Every element of your brand should align with your mission, providing a consistent message to stakeholders, including employees, donors, sponsors, and the beneficiaries of your work.

Your charity’s vision communicates your goals for the future. It’s inspiring, motivating, and shows a glimpse of the ideal future you’re working towards. For example, Samaritans hopes for a world where fewer people die by suicide; the British Heart Foundation wants a future free from the fear of heart diseases; Parkinson’s UK works to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

Together, mission and vision bring your stakeholders closer, and align your look, tone, and actions to differentiate you from others in the sector.

Strategies for raising charity brand awareness

Use the power of socials

Social media is powerful. It’s built on connection, and once the ball gets rolling, with collaboration, enagagement, and interaction, it can lead to amazing things.

Run targeted campaigns on Instagram, X, TikTok, and Facebook to highlight and celebrate your brand purpose, your success stories, events, and community, and the impact you’ve already had. Make use of testimonials, video content, and real-world storytelling, and create easily shareable content to get people talking about the work you do and the positive impact you’re having.

But, be sure to make all of your social media campaigns relevant to each platform. What works on X will not work on Instagram, so delve into each ecosystem, understand how it works and who’s using it, and get creative.

Collaborate

Partnering up with well-known personalities, influencers, and celebrities that align with your values and understand your purpose can expand your reach in a huge way by bringing their audience and yours together. It makes everyone feel good to put their name to charity work, and famous people are often happy to help without a huge fee. Plus, you can boost credibility with well-considered partnerships, too. In recent years, the power online communities have in swaying opinions and inspiring actions has ballooned, so why not make the most of it?

Bring people together

People power is essential in charity work, and the events and community-focused campaigns you hold can make your brand a household name. A good example is the viral ice bucket challenge to raise awareness of ALS — that challenge alone raised $115 million and funded research that led to the discovery of five new ALS-associated genes and new treatments. Macmillan coffee mornings are also a familiar occurrence throughout the UK, and the British Heart Foundation’s London to Brighton bike ride gets thousands of people each summer raising money and awareness before and during the ride.

The best fundraising events are fun, memorable, and meaningful, and they should represent your audience and the people you want to help. Out of the box thinking will land you a fundraising event that will get people talking for years to come — and looking forward to the next one.

Stay true to who you are

With brand consistency comes trust and credibility. You need to stay consistent across all of your efforts to build awareness and instil a sense of purpose in your communications. People should be able to connect one fundraising event with another, your TV campaigns with your social media posts, and recognise that all of these moving parts are moving in the same direction: to realise your goal as a charity. Consistency means people will always know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how their support can make a better world a reality.

Effective charity marketing campaigns

The most powerful and memorable charity marketing campaigns get to the heart of an issue or your goals quickly and simply. They evoke emotion, open eyes, and get conversations started. To develop a compelling message that speaks on the change you want to make or an issue that needs greater awareness, think about:

• What you’re working to change
• Why you want to change it
• Why people should trust you to be the one to change it
• The emotions the problem you’re trying to solve evokes in people
• How people can help

Successful campaigns

Let’s examine two successful campaigns from the last couple of years and consider what they did to inspire their audience and increase awareness of their cause and ultimately increase brand value.

Charity: water — The True Colours of Dirty Water

This is an eye-opening and unique campaign that ran on Instagram in 2022. It encouraged users to pick a colour out of a palette of greens, greys, oranges, and yellows, with each shade representing the different and surprising colours dirty water can be. At the heart of this campaign was the reminder that people around the globe have no choice but to drink water that is unclean and unsafe.

It was a very interactive campaign that opened people’s eyes to the global water crisis. By evoking a blend of shock through the dirty water colour palette, empathy with the real stories of the people Charity: water has helped, and hope in its message that their mission to end the water crisis is possible with donor support, it helped increase fundraising efforts and awareness of its purpose.

Shelter — #MadeInSocialHousing

This campaign from Shelter used a catchy hashtag, #MadeInSocialHousing, that is steeped in meaning, and paired it with well-known actors, musicians, presenters, and more to get its message across: secure housing changes lives. It also gave a platform to people throughout the UK to share how access to affordable social housing changed their lives for the better through using TV, social media, podcast, and in-store advertising.

It opened up the conversation on the UK’s housing crisis and put the shocking reality into focus: over 1.3 million households are on waiting lists throughout the country and homelessness has hit record levels.

Get more inspiration with our roundup of our favourite charity campaigns.

How do you measure the success of your charity campaign?

The work isn’t done after your campaign is over. Now it’s time to see what impact you had! Consider making a plan to track the following metrics during and after your campaign to get a great overview of the success your marketing efforts have had:

• Social media interactions: Tracking likes, views, shares, comments, stitches, and more show you how your campaign has resonated with your audience. Remember, the more you get people talking online, the greater the brand awareness will be.
• Donations: Measure how much donations increase before and after your campaign, along with your boost in new donor numbers. You can also look at whether the donation size has also gone up, showing you that your campaign successfully convinced people to part with their money to support your cause.
• Conversion rates: You can also track whether people moved from awareness to action. This means your campaign inspired people to take certain actions, such as signing up to newsletters, attending events, or signing up as a volunteer.

You’ll need to think about what you want your marketing campaign to achieve and decide what to track before the campaign starts, so get these decisions in the bag early!

Building long-term brand recognition

Let’s look at how you can live long in the minds of your audience.

Consistent branding

How you communicate your brand should be consistent wherever people interact with it, whether that’s on your website or social media accounts, through merchandise, newsletters, and campaigns, or at events. It’s important people can rely on you to be the charity they connected with in the first place, and keeping your messaging and visuals on point is beneficial for your public and internal stakeholders alike.

Memorable campaigns

“A dog is for life, not just for Christmas.” Now that’s a charity slogan that has stood the test of time — 45 years to be exact. But why?

It got straight to the heart of the issue: dogs were increasingly seen as disposable gifts that people weren’t prepared to care for once the excitement of a new puppy wore off. So, Dog’s Trust plastered this slogan onto 200,000 of car stickers, which effectively spread this sentiment around the country. In the end, it had to trademark the slogan to ward off copycats trying to use its success.

But how do you come up with a campaign that will enjoy that level of longevity? Think about:

• who your target audience is and how they think and feel about the issue you’re tackling
• using snappy copywriting to get a slogan or motto that sticks
• using storytelling to nurture emotional connections to your charity brand

• featuring the people, animals, or environments you’re trying to help
• staying authentic by consulting the communities you aim to serve

There are so many campaigns that have stuck around in the public consciousness because they made the most out of their product or cause: they highlighted what it meant.

Leveraging media and public relations

You can’t underestimate the power of the media, and keeping in touch with local news stations means you’ll consistently be in public consciousness. Every event you hold or success story you reap should be shared far and wide. Over time, people will be used to hearing about your incredible work and impact and will think of you first next time they want to donate their time or money.

Engaging with donors and volunteers

That said, you shouldn’t only keep in touch with the people that can get your name on the news. Regular communication with your donors and volunteers keeps the engagement going. After all, they’re some of the most important people in your organisation. It ensures they know their support is valued, important, and essential to achieving your goal.

Challenges in charity brand awareness and how to overcome them

Let’s look at what charities are up against when building brand awareness — and crucially, what you can do about it.

Getting lost in the noise

The nonprofit sector is a busy one, and the fight for the public’s attention is fierce. Drilling down into your mission and values will bolster your brand purpose and visual identity, helping you carve out a space and unique personality for your brand.

Working with limited resources

Charities don’t have endless budgets, and that can be a serious hindrance when you want to invest in building brand awareness. Without the money to invest in large-scale marketing campaigns, what can you do? You can draw on your community to help build organic buzz with interactive social campaigns, polls, and challenges, and draw on the local news to help you spread your word. Some of the most creative ideas come from the tightest binds, so have fun thinking outside the box!

Building and retaining trust

2023 research showed that brand trust has become more important than ever, and consumers are becoming more discerning before they align themselves with a brand. The study revealed that consumers:

• are more concerned about the health and environmental impact of brands
• believe trusting a brand is one of the most important parts of their buying decision
• want brands to be clearer about their values

It even goes as far as showing that if a brand isn’t clear on how it benefits society, consumers are more likely to think it’s not doing anything for the greater good, or that it’s hiding something suspicious.

All of this applies to charities and non-profit organisations, too.

So, transparency is key. Be honest and be clear about where donations go, what you aim to do with the support you get, which goals you’ve reached, and which you have still yet to meet. Tell people who you’re working with to realise your mission, and think carefully about the political or cultural figures you align your work with. As it turns out, people are even concerned about which country hosts a brand’s headquarters.

Demonstrating your impact

Beating cancer, stopping domestic violence, and slowing down climate change are no easy feats, and organisations tackling problems like this know that their road ahead is long, and they will need support for the whole journey. Showing your audience the impact of your work can be difficult, but not doing so will hurt your brand’s credibility and awareness.

So, celebrate your wins! Use newsletters, pamphlets, your website, and marketing and social media campaigns to let the world know the progress you’re making. Partner up with all the people working with you and regularly assess your progress together to build a picture of how you’re delivering on your mission at a local and national level. Not only will this show your audience their support is having an impact, but it will also cement you as an organisation making real change.

The future of charity branding

Research from 2023 shows that while 65% of the UK public still donate regularly to a charity — a number much lower than in previous years — they are more likely to be much choosier about who they donate to.

This indicates that increasing your brand awareness will be a crucial step to take to prosper in the years ahead: the more people that know about you and your work, the more likely people will be to choose you as their preferred charity.

Flexibility in the way you reach your audience and bring new people on board with your mission will be important. The world is a tumultuous place, and people’s time, attention, and finances are stretched. While fewer people may be able to regularly donate to charities, more people are shopping in charity shops both to save money and to show their support for the charities helping those more vulnerable than them, meaning a focus on in-store advertising and campaigning could be beneficial. Think about how times and habits are changing, and move with your audience to keep them on board.

Generating charity brand awareness is challenging, but certainly not impossible. By involving and inspiring your audience, delving deep into your brand purpose, mission, and vision, and utilising all the power online communities can hold, you can build a charity brand that people remember. Plus, you can become an authority in the third sector, owning your space and changing the world in amazing ways.

Do you want to get more people talking about your charity?

If you want to understand your audience, undertake a memorable brand refresh, delve deeper into your brand strategy, and take on all the challenges of the third sector with confidence, drop us a line.