Ringing a bell?

Analysing available evidence on the

sources and benefits of awareness for
charities

Cian Murphy, Kate Cranston-Turner and Joe Saxton

May 2015

w: www.nfpSynergy.net t: 020 7426 8888 e: insight@nfpsynergy.net

Introduction
We are often asked by clients what the relationship is between the various different
measures of awareness, such as prompted awareness, spontaneous awareness and
understanding of which cause a charity works in, and their other real world measures,
like total or voluntary income and media spend.
This query suggests broader questions. What do you have to do or spend to improve
your brand? How much of a connection is there between being well-known and raising
funds? What kind of an impact on income can you expect from growing your awareness
and vice versa? What are the strategies for growing awareness? How important are
other brand measures like understanding, engagement and potential support?
This five part report looks at some of the questions and analyses two areas in detail:
the relationship between awareness and income, and that between awareness and
media spend. We did this by taking a sample of nearly 60 of the UKs best-known
charities, ranging in size from tens of million to hundreds of million, and analysing
nfpSynergy data on them alongside their accounts and media spend over the last five
years.
Part 1 - Awareness - where does it come from and why is it important?
This part examines the sources of awareness, and why it might matter for a charity.
Part 2: Analysing two of the sources of awareness: paid media spend and
levels of income
This part looks at the top level relationship between different variables, i.e. how is
income correlated with awareness?
Part 3: Changes in awareness, media spend and income over time
This part explores the interaction of these variables over time. How much have charities
spent on raising their awareness over the past few years? What is the most important
factor in increasing your brands profile?
Part 4: Evidence from case studies for and against media spend or income
driving awareness
This part shares some specific examples of charities that have either raised their profile
or income, or both, in recent years. Are there clues as to how they did it? What can be
learned from their track records?
Part 5: Towards a strategy for raising awareness
This part looks at the stepping stones and approaches that underpin how awareness
might be turned into income. It pulls together a number of threads to see how a charity
can successfully develop and put into action an awareness-building or brand strategy.

Part 1: Awareness - where does it

come from and why is it important?
Awareness of a charity (or any other organisation) comes from a whole variety of
sources. These different sources intertwine, making it difficult to establish exactly where
awareness comes from. Equally importantly, it does not take long before people struggle
to remember how they first heard about a charity. So while the areas below are many of
the different sources of recognition or awareness, it is very difficult to disentangle and
research how people came to remember a charity and to decide which sources are the
most important.
Paid advertising
Awareness advertising is probably seen as the best-known route to improving
awareness, and particularly spontaneous awareness. There is no doubt that for some
charities, their investment in paid advertising is the reason, wholly or partly, for their
high levels of awareness. Our analysis later in this report shows that there is a clear
relationship between paid advertising and awareness. The problem is that this
relationship doesnt hold for every charity there are plenty of well-known charities that
spend minimal amounts on awareness advertising.
High (free) media profile
Many charities want to get a high profile in the media by running media campaigns at
both the local and national level. Many succeed in securing media coverage in
newspapers, on TV and radio, in magazines and increasingly on social media. The great
advantage of exploiting the media is that coverage is free, or very low cost. The
disadvantage is that its very hard to control, and theres no guarantee that the media
will cover a story just because a charity puts out a press release.
Friends and family
We all hear about some of the activities of charities, to a greater or lesser extent,
through our friends and families. Friends ask us to support their sponsored event, or we
hear about colleagues volunteering for a charity at an event or in a shop. There are a
host of ways that people can become aware of charities through their nearest and
dearest. However, measuring how much awareness is raised by this, let alone
influencing it, is very difficult. Moreover, there is a high degree of overlap with the next
source of awareness.
Community activities and the work of volunteers
Many people hear about the work of charities through their local community. Children
fundraise through Scouts or at church, or they raise money for charities at school.
Saturday morning shopping is peppered with requests to give to a tin-rattler.
3

Somebody reads their local newspaper and its articles about the work of charities. The
list of possible ways that somebody hears about a charity locally is huge, and most is
driven by volunteer time and commitment. All of that should raise awareness.
Extensive fundraising activities
The big brother of awareness through community activities is a broad-based range of
fundraising activities. Those charities that do an extensive amount of fundraising
particularly individual and community fundraising raise awareness through the
frequent contact people may have with direct mail and door-drops, newspapers inserts
and ads, posters requesting a text donation and internet banner ads with click-through
options. Face-to-face fundraisers on the high street also drive awareness, as do national
and local events. The less common yet equally powerful community activities are those
where some charities campaign to change government or corporate policies, or to
change peoples behaviour.
Charity shops and charity services
There are few who would disagree that charity shop chains raise awareness. The idea of
a permanent presence on the high street continuously raising awareness is compelling.
Yet our public research would indicate that it is probably only the market leaders, most
notably Oxfam, who gain much in awareness from a charity shop chain. This awareness
has taken years to build and given the decline in high street retail, it is unlikely that any
new entrant could use a charity retail chain to raise awareness today, at least not at a
national level.
Iconic events
There are a limited number of events at a national level, or sometimes a local level,
which effectively provide a platform to raise awareness of a charity. Perhaps the bestknown is the Poppy Appeal by the Royal British Legion. Marie Curie has been doing its
best to raise the profile of its Great Daffodil Appeal, while Christian Aid Week remains a
high profile fundraising event even without a flower behind it.
There have been attempts to create new iconic events. The most recent (and successful)
is probably Movember, and before that Race for Life. While both are fundraising events,
they also raise awareness. The challenge all iconic events struggle with is linking the
event with the cause or the organisation. Is there any more to Movember than the fun
of growing a moustache? Which charity is it that runs the poppy appeal?
Market and brand position
It may seem strange to categorise brand or market position as a source of awareness.
The reason we include it in this part of the report is that the right positioning translates
the inputs (i.e. the sources mentioned above) into awareness more efficiently. If a
charity is more memorable, more distinctive or more compelling, then a member of the
public who has contact with it is more likely to remember it later. It is probably no
4

coincidence, for example, that three of the UKs best-known charities, Oxfam, NSPCC
and RSPCA, all have unique and memorable names (despite being acronyms). Many
other charities that feature prominently in public awareness have distinctive niches (e.g.
RNLI) or occupy market positions of deep concern to the public (e.g. Cancer Research
UK). All of the inputs that create awareness work more effectively if the charity adopts
the right brand strategy and positioning.

Why is awareness important?

Awareness facilitates a range of other activities. It is like a kind of organisational fitness,
not necessarily an end in itself but a means to one. So what do higher levels of
awareness facilitate? There is a breadth of areas:
High awareness makes fundraising easier. Anybody who has tried to fundraise
through an event such as running a marathon will know the difference that having a
household name can make. Telling people that you are raising money for Macmillan/
Oxfam/Barnardos or the like is a much easier sell than raising money for a charity
nobody has heard of (and worse still, a cause nobody has heard of either).
High awareness makes media coverage easier. Most journalists have a host of
press releases and emails to read every day. An organisation that is known to a
journalist is a really important precursor to coverage. Awareness in this context doesnt
guarantee media coverage, but it increases the chances when a journalist has hundreds
of emails to even open, let alone read. Charities still need to produce powerful,
compelling stories for the media to cover of course.
High awareness makes campaigning and lobbying easier. Awareness is
important even for campaigning and lobbying. When UNICEF tells us about abuses of
childrens rights, any MP is more likely to take notice compared to a charity they have
never heard of. The same is true of the public when asked to lobby their MP on a
particular issue: awareness of an organisation shortens or shortcuts the process of
asking whether the organisation and its message are credible, and whether they should
be taken seriously.
High awareness makes it easier to influence public opinion. Charities often want
to influence public attitudes and opinion, or even change public behaviour on an issue.
Again, awareness of the organisation is a critical precursor to taking notice of what they
have to say.
These are just a few areas where awareness matters. It also helps with the delivery of
services and the recruitment of staff, the winning of local and central government
contracts and in a host of other areas.

Awareness alone is not enough

There is a theme that runs throughout all these areas where awareness is important;
awareness is the beginning of the engagement process, rather than the end of it. We
will talk about it more in the final part, but people do not need to just be aware of an
organisation, they also need to know what it does and they need a strong and
favourable opinion of it. In other words, organisations need to have a brand strategy
intertwined with their awareness strategy.

Part 2: Analysing two of the

sources of awareness: media spend
and levels of income
In Part 1, we outlined a range of possible routes to increasing awareness, and in reality
there are probably more than that. In this section, we look at two of them in detail: paid
media spend and extensive fundraising activities. While some of the sources of
awareness are quite hard to measure (for example the role of friends and family), the
two we examine here have more robust and publicly available data.
Notes and caveats about methodology
This analysis needs to have some caveats applied. First, our measures of media spend
use rate card expenditure as their measure of activity. Rate card is the amount that a
media outlet says it will charge for any given space, rather than the amount that is
negotiated for then actually paid. Any measure of how much is actually spent on media
is an index of media activity rather than the bill a charity pays, because it may have
negotiated a great deal with advertisers or even been given space for free.
We have used the levels of total and voluntary income as a proxy for fundraising activity.
For most charities, the levels of activity will bear some relation to the levels of income
(or at least we would hope so). For charities who receive large amounts of legacy or
statutory income, this may not be the case, as we will see in the case studies in Part 4.
A full methodology terminology is available at the end of the report with an explanation
of all statistical terms and how we gathered the data.
With this in mind, lets use an example to explain what it might mean when we say that
an r2 = 0.33 means that 33% of the variation is explained by this relationship. If we
talked about childrens success in an exam, we might say that on average 33% of their
success was down to revision. This implies that 67% is down to other things: the
teachers, the parents, the syllabus, the right questions on the day, how smart the child
is and so on. The danger is that readers look at 33% and say revision isnt very
important. Well, if in practice this means that on average a child who doesnt revise will
get worse results than one who does, then an r2 of 0.33 seems a lot more important.
There will be always be children who revise a lot and dont do well, and those who do no
revision and do well.
To help you read each chart, anything with blue dots is prompted awareness and
anything with purple dots is spontaneous awareness.

The relationship between prompted awareness and income

The prompted awareness score for a charity is the broadest measure of awareness we
track and is quite simply the proportion of the population that has heard of the
organisation.
Unsurprisingly then, as chart 1 below shows, we found that there is a very strong
relationship between prompted awareness and total income levels. In statistical terms,
our analysis showed an r of .33 (using a log-transformed regression), implying that
33% of the variation in one can be explained by the other. We try and explain more
about the statistical analysis we have carried out, and the jargon we use, in the box
above and the appendix at the end.

Chart 1: Prompted awareness vs total

income
100%

80%
p < .001

R = 0.33

Prompted
Awareness 60%

40%

20%

0%
0

100,000

200,000
300,000
400,000
Total income in thousands (100,000 = 100 million)

500,000

Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor

Generally speaking, the higher an organisations total income, the higher its awareness
(or vice-versa), though above around the 200 million mark, most charities are already
household names, have 90%-plus awareness and cant actually go any higher.
Looking at the pattern, there are also several charities considerably below the trend line.
This suggests that their awareness is considerably lower than might be expected for
their income profile. This tends to reflect organisations that receive a higher proportion
of their income from non-fundraised sources. We can see this reflected in Chart 1 above
and then in Chart 2 below, which looks at the correlation between prompted awareness
and voluntary income only.
Again, we find similar levels of correlation between prompted awareness and voluntary
income, with an r2 implying that 31% of the variation in one can be explained by the
8

other. There is a similar shape to the graph, with an initial steep rise in awareness
between 10m and 100m, then a levelling off afterwards as organisations reach
household name status.

Chart 2: Prompted awareness vs voluntary

income
100%

p < .001

80%

R = 0.31
Prompted
Awareness

60%

40%

20%

0%
0

100,000

200,000
Voluntary income (k)

300,000

400,000

Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor. Note x axis goes to 400 million

As noted previously, there are fewer organisations below the line, suggesting that there
is almost a minimum level of prompted awareness required to reach a given voluntary
income. While there are a few exceptions, most organisations are just above or near the
line.
It is important to note that with all these findings, correlation does not imply causation.
In other words, just because theres a relationship between awareness and income, it
doesnt necessarily mean that awareness drives income. It could be income that drives
awareness. Even if we could establish or guess at causation, it is difficult to know which
direction the relationship runs in. For example, on the one hand higher awareness could
lead to more successful fundraising, and thus higher voluntary and total income.
Alternatively, growing income could free up more money for fundraising and
communications work which grows an organisations brand. In reality of course, it is
likely to be a bit of both factors, combining in a cycle of growth for both awareness and
income.

The relationship between spontaneous awareness and

income
The next measure we tracked against income levels was spontaneous awareness. This is
a totally unprompted measure where respondents are asked to simply name the first
9

charities that come to mind. Again, with this awareness measure we see a strong
relationship with voluntary income (and the same is true for total income) in Chart 3.

Chart 3: Spontaneous awareness vs voluntary

income
50%
p <0.001

R = 0.58
40%

Spontaneous
Awareness 30%

20%

10%

0%
0

200,000
Voluntary income (k)

400,000

Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor Note x axis goes to 400 million

While the r values show high levels of association (the r value is .49 for total income,
though not shown in a chart, and .58 for voluntary income in Chart 3), it is also
interesting to note that there appear to be fewer outliers and organisations not matching
the trend when it comes to spontaneous, awareness. This perhaps suggests that
changes in spontaneous awareness may be more closely linked to income than they
were for prompted awareness. There is also a reasonably linear relationship (straight
line), especially for smaller organisations, suggesting the association is more direct than
with prompted awareness. It may also be a result of the fact that there is not the same
ceiling while many charities have prompted awareness of 95%, there are none who
have spontaneous awareness over 50%, and the vast majority are substantially below
that level.
Our conclusion is that as charities grow their income (and particularly their voluntary
income), they increase their spontaneous awareness, and vice versa. The real difficulty
is to answer the question of which comes first income or awareness. The best answer
we can give at this stage is that the relationship is interdependent; awareness boosts
income and income boosts awareness as a cycle. Equally importantly, any boost in
awareness decays or decreases over time, so a boost in awareness from an advertising
campaign will probably have returned to pre-advertising levels within a year based on
our experience.

10

The relationship between awareness and media spend

Our second analysis of the source of awareness is media spend (as opposed to free
editorial and social media coverage). We looked at organisations media spend using five
years worth of data.
Spontaneous awareness was reasonably strongly associated with media spend (r =
0.39 and see Chart 4), slightly less strongly than it was associated with total income.
However, using a technique known as multiple regression, we can see that media spend
has an impact on spontaneous awareness regardless of income. This suggests that the
effect is not simply a result of higher income charities generally having higher media
budgets.

Chart 4: Spontaneous awareness vs media

spend
50%

40%
p <0.001

Spontaneous
Awareness 30%

R = 0.39

20%

10%

0%
0

5,000

10,000
Total media spend (k)

15,000

20,000

Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor

Prompted awareness, however, is significantly less responsive to media spend than to

income, with a considerably lower R = 0.22 (see Chart 5).
This is an important nuance in terms of raising awareness: paid-for media, such as TV
and print media, has a much bigger effect on spontaneous awareness than it does on
prompted awareness. This suggests that the main impact of media spend is on shortterm top-of-mind awareness, rather than on whether people have heard of a charity in
the first place. Equally important is that any boost in spontaneous awareness will decay
over time and need re-boosting in six to 12 months. Boosting prompted awareness may
require a longer-term strategic focus on brand, rather than just short-term media
spending.
11

Chart 6 cuts out awareness, the middle-man so to speak, and shows a strong
relationship between media spend and voluntary income, with an r2 of 0.52. Its worth
pointing out, however, that this could simply mean that charities with large amounts of
money can afford to spend it on media.

Chart 5: Prompted awareness vs media spend

100%

80%
Prompted
Awareness

60%
p <0.001

R = 0.22
40%

20%

0%
0

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

Total media spend (k)

Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor

Chart 6: Voluntary income v media spend

Voluntary Income (k)

400,000
350,000
300,000

250,000
200,000
150,000
p <0.001
100,000

R = 0.52

50,000
0
0

5,000

10,000
Total media spend (k)

15,000

20,000

Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor. This chart is especially for Vicky.

12

Part 3: Changes in awareness,

media spend and income over time
The next stage of the research looks at how these variables changed over time in an
attempt to understand how changes in awareness might lead to changes in income, or
how changes in income might lead to changes in awareness. We were also keen to see
how much awareness changed more generally.
Charities cannot take their awareness for granted; it does go down as well as up, and it
does reduce gradually over time if a charity does nothing to maintain or increase it.
Doing nothing about awareness levels is not standing still, but probably managing a slow
decline.

Chart 7: Changes in awareness levels, 20092013

Decrease of over 3 percentage points

14

Prompted Awareness

Spontaneous Awareness
10

Decrease of 1 - 3 percentage points

11

Stayed the same

26

16

Increase of 1 - 3 percentage points

Increase of over 3 percentage points

20

7
3

Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor

As Chart 7 shows, charities awareness does fluctuate. For spontaneous awareness, the
most common change over the time in our analysis is to see a slight increase in
awareness or for it to remain static. For prompted awareness, the spread of changes in
Chart 7 is more broadly based with a substantial number of charities showing an
increase in their awareness, but a significant minority showing a decrease.

13

Prompted awareness and media spend

Charities that increased their prompted awareness increased their media spend on
average by 1.4 million over five years for an average increase of six points of
awareness. This suggests that it would be necessary to increase your media spend by a
substantial amount each year over several years for a single point of prompted
awareness.
However, this figure should be treated with considerable caution when we look at
organisations that did not increase their prompted awareness. Charities whose
prompted awareness stayed identical over the five years in question also increased their
media spend, and by practically the same amount; 1.29 million on average. Its worth
noting though, that although there was no increase, it might well have stopped a
decrease.
In fact, of those who increased their media spend, just under half saw an increase in
their prompted awareness. Those who decreased or maintained their media spend had a
40% chance of an increase in their prompted awareness. This is confusing. The
implication of it is that spending money on media alone is no guarantee of increased
awareness and that it has to be done effectively. This is an issue we will explore more in
the final section.
Indeed, when we correlate change in media spend with change in prompted awareness,
we see little relationship. This may suggest a number of things:

It is easy to spend money on media in a way that does not increase prompted
awareness - too much clever awareness advertising, poor targeting of media
spend
Charities that spend on media may not be primarily using it to grow their brand.
Fundraising, campaigning and communications with specific groups may all be
more important motivations than growing awareness of the brand
Media spend alone may not be enough to grow prompted awareness, or it may
be the wrong strategy for some organisations. As we explore in Part 5, an
effective strategy for growing awareness is a critical success factor in building
understanding and knowledge of an organisation
Prompted awareness may simply be more difficult to achieve these days. As
brand awareness tends to be highly static and the number of charities is everincreasing, space for them in peoples minds may simply be more limited

All of this suggests two things. Firstly, to say it one more time, spending money on
media does not guarantee an increase in prompted awareness; the investment in
advertising needs to be spent in the right way. Secondly, as we have explored in the
previous section, there are other ways to increase prompted awareness other than
media spend.
14

Spontaneous awareness and media spend

Equally interesting is when we come to look at how changes in spontaneous awareness
relate to changes in media spending over a five year period. Here in Chart 8, we see a
correlation, though not a hugely strong one:

Chart 8: Changes in spontaneous awareness

vs changes in media spend
Change in spontaneous awareness
5%

p <0.001

R = 0.19

0%

-5,000

5,000

10,000
Change in media spend (k)

-5%

Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor

Although the relationship only accounts for 20% of the variation between the two, it still
seems a reasonable rule of thumb that increasing a media budget will increase
spontaneous awareness, while decreasing it leads to an awareness decrease. Of
charities that increased their media spend, 52% saw an increase in spontaneous
awareness, compared to just 33% that saw an increase despite only maintaining
spending.
On average, those that increased their spontaneous awareness increased their media
spend by 1.7 million over the five years. Those who only maintained spontaneous
awareness increased spending by 290,000 per annum (at rate card prices), while those
whose spontaneous awareness dropped had decreased their spend by an average of
233,000.
Its tempting to want these figures as percentages of existing media spend. However, for
an organisation to get traction with its media spend, its the absolute amount that
matters, rather than any percentage.
Using the relationship between spontaneous awareness and media spend, we can then

15

create an estimate for the cost of one point of spontaneous awareness1. Based on the
charities in our survey, an average charity would need to increase its media spend
budget by several million over five years (at rate card prices, so perhaps half that after
negotiation) to achieve an increase of one percentage point of spontaneous awareness.
This is likely to further overestimate the cost of raising spontaneous awareness, because
the sample includes organisations that will have spent money on paid advertising
without the intention of raising spontaneous awareness. It does, however, give an
indication of the uphill struggle faced by organisations that are aiming to increase it.
We conclude that while media spend does increase spontaneous awareness, it is best
suited to those organisations with both deep pockets and a focused, long-term brand
strategy.

Voluntary income and awareness over time

So far, we have seen that increasing media spend seems to be an effective, if fairly
expensive, way of increasing spontaneous awareness, but more is needed to grow a
brands overall prompted awareness. So how do these two measures interact with a
charitys voluntary income?
Chart 8 shows a weak relationship between changes in spontaneous awareness and
changes in media spend. Chart 9 (below) shows a very weak relationship between
changes in spontaneous awareness and changes in voluntary income. The statistics for
these two charts show the lack of any meaningful relationship with an r2 of 0.05. Damn
damn damn! Data can be so frustrating.
In Part 2, we saw a strong relationship and yet in terms of changes over time, the
relationship doesnt exist. The data for changes in prompted awareness and voluntary
income shows the same weak relationship. How can the snapshot of the relationship in
Chart 3 show such a strong relationship and the story over time show such a little
relationship?
The reasons for this lack of relationship are intriguing and various explanations are
possible. One hypothesis is a statistical one; that the changes in both voluntary income
and spontaneous awareness are too small to produce a relationship (see all those points
clustering around zero, i.e. no change or little change in Chart 8). Another is that raising
awareness by itself does not lead to increased donations. In other words, charities are
not effectively using an increase in awareness or income as a fuel for increase in the
other. In Part 5, we look at the stepping stones that might be needed to lead from
increased awareness to increased income (and vice versa).
1

This is by necessity based on quite a small sample size, so the figure should be taken with a good pinch of
salt. These figures are also based on rate card prices in the real world, charities receive substantial
discounts on these prices, suggesting that the actual cost may be lower. Its the media activity rather than
the media cost that really matters.
16

Chart 9: Changes in spontaneous awareness

vs changes in voluntary income
Change in spontaneous
awareness

8%

R = 0.05
6%

4%

2%

0%
-40,000

-20,000

20,000

-2%

40,000

60,000

80,000

Change in voluntary income (k)

-4%

-6%
Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor

Increased awareness may be driven by other factors that we arent measuring here,
such as more campaigning, increased services or a higher media profile. Alternatively, it
may be that the fundraising and communications teams arent working closely together.
As shocking as it may sound, we do know a few charities where fundraising and
communications dont work well together!
These charts suggest that increasing fundraised income is not necessarily the same
process as increasing a charitys brand profile and there is no simple relationship
between the two activities. Indeed, we would go one step further and say that any
charity which believes that increasing awareness on its own will lead to increased
income without them having to do anything else will probably be disappointed.
Increased awareness can only possibly lead to increased income if a charity has all its
brand, communications and fundraising ducks in a row. We explore what this means in
practice in Part 5.
Having looked at the situation for charities en masse, it may now be useful to see
examples of some individual charities that have seen an increase or decrease in their
prompted awareness over this period.

17

Part 4: Evidence from case studies

for and against media spend or
income driving awareness
The last section was full of stats2. This one is full of the case studies of individual
organisations and looks at how their awareness, income and media spend have changed
over time.
The point of these case studies is not to cast judgment, but simply to see whether some
of the relationships we saw (or didnt see) in the last section bear a relationship to the
records of individual organisations.

Case study: British Red Cross

A long-term household name in Britain with over 90% prompted awareness, the British
Red Cross (BRC) has gradually become more and more likely to be top-of-mind among
members of the public. While the overseas charities generally see temporarily boosted
spontaneous awareness during major disaster appeals, the success seen by BRC has
been both sustained and consistent over time. Chart 10 shows how it has increased its
spontaneous awareness quite consistently over the last few years.

Chart 10: British Red Cross Spontaneous

Awareness 2009-2013

21%

11%

Oct-08 Mar-09 Aug-09 Jan-10 Jun-10 Nov-10 Apr-11 Sep-11 Feb-12

Jul-12 Dec-12 May-13 Oct-13

Source: Charity Awareness Monitor

Statistical analysis of r2 = .586 shows that we are quite keen on evidence and statistics at
nfpSynergy, even if the results are on occasions not as clear-cut as we might like.
18

This has followed a consistent growth in media spend, as shown below in Chart 11. Over
the same period, however, income has also grown. Voluntary income grew from 95m in
2009 to a peak of 130m in 2011, before declining to 109m in 2012, but then rising
again to 128 million in 2013. While BRCs income is always likely to be variable
depending on the number and scale of emergency appeals in a given year, the result is
still consistent with our findings that increased media spend can increase spontaneous
awareness, as can fundraised income. The case for BRC seems to be a virtuous circle
with income, spontaneous awareness and media spend all increasing between 2009 and
2013, even if not consistently

Chart 11: British Red Cross Voluntary

Income and Media Spend (k) 2009-2013
150,000

14,000
13,198

Voluntary Income
Media Spend
135,000

12,000

120,000

10,000

105,000

Media Spend

Voluntary income

128,300

8,000
7,546

95,600
90,000

6,000
2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

Source: Charity Commission, Charity Financials and Charity Awareness Monitor

Case study: RNLI

Looking forward to Charts 12 (awareness) and 13 (media spend and income), its
tempting to see RNLI as a case study which shows that even though awareness is static
and media spend is declining, income can still increase. The first point we would make is
that growing awareness through media and fundraising activities is only one of the
strategies that a charity can take to increase its profile. Secondly, its always worth
digging behind the figures wherever possible. While RNLIs income has grown, it is
legacy income that has risen, not general fundraising (which is largely stable at around
50 million a year). This is one of the reasons why neither voluntary income, nor in
particular total income, relate more closely to awareness. Indeed, there are lots of
sources of income that dont relate to todays awareness. In the case of legacy income,
it may relate better to the situation 10 or 20 years ago.

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Chart 12: RNLI Spontaneous Awareness

2009-2013

8%

8%

Oct-08 Mar-09 Aug-09 Jan-10

Jun-10 Nov-10 Apr-11

Sep-11 Feb-12

Jul-12

Dec-12 May-13 Oct-13

Source: Charity Awareness Monitor

Chart 13: RNLI Voluntary Income and Media

Spend (k) 2009-2013
170,000

8,000

169,510

Voluntary income

7,500

Media spend
7,000

6,773

6,500
6,000
5,500

Media Spend

Voluntary Income

160,000

150,000
5,000

145,500

4,832
4,500

140,000

4,000
2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

Source: Charity Commission, Nielsen and Charity Financials

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Case study: Oxfam

Oxfam has had one of the highest levels of spontaneous awareness in our research of
any charity for many years, although it is fairly static (or indeed, consistent).

Chart 14: Oxfam Spontaneous Awareness

2011-2013

48%
44%

Sep-11

44%

Dec-11

Mar-12

Jun-12

Sep-12

Dec-12

Mar-13

Jun-13

Sep-13

Source: Charity Awareness Monitor

However, its voluntary income has shrunk over the last few years from 133 million in
2009 to 118 million in 2013, as Chart 15 shows. Its media spend has yo-yoed over the
same period and is relatively low at around 4-5 million. By way of comparison, British
Red Cross spends over 13 million for a roughly similar level of voluntary income.

Chart 15: Oxfam Voluntary Income and

Media Spend (k) 2009-2013
150,000

4,677

4,620
4,500

Voluntary Income

133,900
130,000

4,000
120,000

Voluntary income

Media Spend

140,000

5,000

118,300

Media spend

3,500

110,000

100,000

3,000
2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

Source: Charity Commission, Nielsen and Charity Financials

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Case Study: WaterAid

Finally, WaterAid has had significant success in growing awareness of its brand in recent
years (Chart 16), as well as increasing its income and media spend (Chart 17). In other
words, the three indicators we are measuring are all heading in the right direction. Its
prompted awareness has risen from 45% in 2008 to 63% in 2013, while voluntary
income has risen from roughly 29 million to 43 million in the same period.

Chart 16: WaterAid Prompted Awareness

2009-2013
63%

45%

Oct-08 Mar-09 Aug-09 Jan-10

Jun-10 Nov-10 Apr-11 Sep-11 Feb-12

Jul-12

Dec-12 May-13 Oct-13

Source: Charity Awareness Monitor

Without knowing more about WaterAids communications and fundraising strategy, its
impossible to know exactly what it has been doing right, but its clearly something. Our
guess is that its about having a clear, focused set of brand messages, a compelling
cause and some very talented staff to make it happen.

Chart 17: WaterAid Voluntary Income and

Media Spend (k) 2009-2013
8,000

Voluntary income

43,441

Media spend

5,984

40,000

7,000

6,000

5,000

30,000

Media Spend

Voluntary Income

50,000

4,000
29,393
3,000
2,602

20,000

2,000
2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

Source: Charity Commission, Nielsen and Charity Financials

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What do the case studies tell us?

The first and last case studies, British Red Cross and WaterAid, show examples of where
awareness, voluntary income and media spend are all rising. We would suspect a
virtuous circle is at work here. The more fundraising a charity does, the better-known it
becomes, the easier it will be to raise money and so its voluntary income will go up,
giving it more income to spend on paid media.
The case studies of RNLI and Oxfam are more complicated. RNLI has raised levels of
voluntary income (albeit with increases in legacy income as a major part of that
increase), but static levels of awareness. This suggests that there are multiple strategies
for raising income, and that its perfectly possible to raise voluntary income without
either having or creating a rising level of awareness. Thats no real surprise. Oxfam
on the other hand also shows static awareness levels, but with voluntary income in
decline. High levels of spontaneous awareness, then, dont prevent a decline in
voluntary income.
The RNLI case study also suggests that its possible to have a decent yet static level of
awareness and that this may not, on its own, raise voluntary income. Earlier we used a
metaphor of awareness being like a kind of organisational fitness. Fitness makes it easier
to run fast and sustain exercise for prolonged period. Equally, being fit on its own does
not win every kind of race. It needs to be the right kind of fitness for the activities that
are likely to be undertaken. Similarly, if awareness is a means to an end, it has to be
harnessed correctly in order to be turned into high levels of voluntary income. How that
might be achieved is the topic of the final part of this report.

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Part 5: Towards a strategy for

raising awareness
Learnings so far
Awareness comes from a breadth of sources, not just income or media spend.
While this report has focused on the data on income and media spend, there are many
sources of awareness, with differing ease of measurement and analysis
Different activities drive different kinds of awareness. The evidence from our
analysis is that media spend is good for raising spontaneous awareness rather than
prompted awareness. The opposite is probably true of charity shops as their presence is
fairly static. The key message, however, is that a charity needs to match its awarenessraising activities with its awareness-raising goals.
And different kinds of awareness matter for different audiences. For fundraising
audiences, its probably prompted and spontaneous awareness that matter the most,
while for political and journalistic audiences it is probably awareness of the cause a
charity works in that matters more. This is only relative though, and partly dictated by
the overall brand (so if a charity is called xxx childrens charity, its name does a lot of
the work on indicating the cause it works in).
Awareness, income and media spend are all strongly correlated with one
another. Unsurprisingly, larger organisations tend to spend more on media and also
tend to have broader and deeper public awareness.
Working out the cause and effect in changes between awareness and
income is very difficult. When we look at changes over time, the interplay between
awareness and income becomes more complicated. Most charities tend to have stable
awareness over time, which makes measuring how change actually happens quite
difficult.
Growth in media budgets does tend to lead to an increase in top-of-mind
association among the public. We estimate, with several provisos, that an average
charity (i.e. whose awareness didnt come from other sources) could have to increase its
media spend by hundreds of thousands of pounds over five years to achieve an increase
of one percentage point of spontaneous awareness.
There was no relationship between changes in media budgets and prompted
awareness. This suggests that other solutions are needed for a growing breadth of
awareness and that it has become more difficult to buy it over time.
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Models for the relationship between awareness and income

We thought it worth trying to set out the relationship between income and awareness
from both the donor and the charitys point of view. Chart 18 shows the sequence of
stepping stones for a donor who has and hasnt heard of a charity, or knows what it
does.

Chart 18: The donors view: how awareness

works

The sequence of events is quite different where a donor is aware of a charity and where
she isnt. Clearly in neither case is there a guarantee of an outcome though. A donor
may be aware of a charity and not give, be it because they have just given, they are
feeling hard-up or for a host of other reasons.
Similarly, lack of awareness doesnt make a donation impossible. Somebody may give
because of a friend they trust, or a street fundraiser they fancy asked them, or because
it is a cause they are passionate about. In either scenario, awareness only increases the
likelihood that somebody will go on to make a donation.
Chart 19 shows the same process from the charitys point of view. The sequence of
events is fairly similar. With awareness, the number of people who are likely to give is
increased. Although giving isnt guaranteed, the percentage that moves forward to each
stepping stone is increased. Chart 19 also shows how increased fundraising can lead to
increased awareness.

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Chart 19: The Charitys view: stepping

stones for awareness to lead to income

The crucial point in both these charts is a charity needs to be managing each stepping
stone. Simply increasing awareness does not lead to income; each step in the process
needs to be completed by hundreds or thousands of donors.

What should a charity do to drive its awareness up?

1. Have a strategy for how you build awareness
Awareness of charities is raised in a whole host of ways: by advertising, by media
coverage, by shops, by services, by staff and volunteers, by community activities and so
on. The biggest charities will probably raise awareness through all these routes.
However, smaller charities with lower awareness need to pick two or three of these
routes and make them happen. Which they choose will depend on the situation for each
charity. This might depend on whether there is a budget for advertising, if there are lots
of services or shops at the local level, whether people do lots of community events for
them or if there a lot of fundraising activities.
2. Decide which aspects of brand and awareness matter to you
Awareness is not one-dimensional, but multi-dimensional. Are people aware of the
charity? Do they know what it does? Does it come to mind when they think of a charity
working on that cause? Or is it pigeon-holed to carry out a certain type of work? Would
they think about a charity to go to for advice, but not to leave a legacy to? The
permutations are huge, so each charity needs to decide which aspects of its awareness
and brand it wants to raise or change. For example, we would normally say that once a
charitys prompted awareness reaches around 70% or so, it may be time to focus on
what the charity does, or on other aspects of the brand. It never ceases to amaze us
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how some charities are very well-known, but when you ask people what it does they are
altogether less clear.
3. Decide who are the key audiences for high awareness
While some charities will want the UK general public to be aware of them, in many cases
the audience for a charitys work is, or should be, more focused. There is a law of
inverse effort with the audiences for communications and fundraising work; the bigger
the audience, the more resources needed to influence them, and the less change in their
awareness will be for any unit of resource. So, if a charity wants to influence five million
members of the public (about 10% of the total adult population), any effort will go
further than if the effort is directed at all over 45s (over 20 million adults), but not
nearly as far as if 650 MPs or 10,000 GP practices are targeted. The key point is to make
sure target audiences are an appropriate size for the available resources with which they
are to be targeted.
4. Work out how you can best communicate with key audiences
An integral part of targeting any audience for brand, awareness, communications or
fundraising activities is the ability to reach that audience. In other words, a
communications channel or route is needed. To use an analogy, an audience without a
means of talking to them is like picking a holiday destination which nobody flies to and
cant easily be reached. For some audiences, the communication channel may be a
database, others a particular type of magazine or TV programme, and for some a
purchased list of names and addresses. Matching an audience with a communication
channel can be time-consuming and expensive to deliver, but its a critical part of any
awareness or brand strategy.
5. Which of your activities would make somebody aware of you?
The great management guru Tom Peters talks about how the management of many
companies undertake management programmes and believe that one or two internal
communications, among the hundreds or thousands or other messages in an employees
inbox, will get staff on board. The same mistake can be made with awareness-building
activities; among the thousands of messages a charity can put out, its all too easy to
believe that a few well-placed ads or straplines will do the business. If a charity wants to
raise awareness as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible, then every email, every
job ad, every tweet, every volunteer and every service needs to be corralled into the
service of awareness-raising.
6. Develop your own stepping stones for translating awareness into income,
and income into awareness
Perhaps all were saying in the previous few paragraphs is that every charity needs to
have its own stepping stones that turn its activities into awareness and income. The
better those stepping stones are mapped out, the easier it will be to channel the
resources and turn strategy into reality (and the easier it will be to work out when
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something doesnt work).

7. Secure the human and financial resources to bring to your strategy to life
No matter how good the strategy, it requires people and money to bring it to life and
make it work. The people resources might be a brand manager to own awarenessraising and make it happen, or local media officers to increase regional or local
coverage. The financial resources might be the budget to send out mailings to a target
audience, or to train staff and volunteers in brand and awareness-raising, run awareness
advertising or increase fundraising activities. While the resources will need to be in
proportion to both the ambition of the organisation and its overall size, without any
people or budget to do the job its hard to see how a strategy can be delivered. For
some, this may be above the line advertising to boost spontaneous awareness, whereas
for others it will be increased media coverage.
8. Make sure the right people are on board internally and externally
One of the constant refrains we hear from comms and fundraising directors is how their
CEOs, and particularly their trustees, tend to have limited patience or support for the
importance of a charitys brand. Indeed, there are some boards where brand is a dirty
word. So one of the tasks for anybody who hopes to build awareness and focus a
charitys brand is to get the right people on board internally. That definitely includes the
fundraising director, the finance director, the CEO and the trustees. If key people dont
support the brand and awareness strategy, it will very easily lose impact and
effectiveness.
9. Know what your awareness levels are
It goes without saying that being able to measure the different types of awareness is
hugely important and its impossible to know whether progress is being made without
some kind of research. The good news is that nfpSynergy runs a very cost-effective
brand tracking service called the Charity Awareness Monitor.3 Some charities may want
to do their own bespoke research to measure very specific aspects of their awareness.
Equally, it may well not be the general public which is the key audience, but your own
volunteers, donors, GPs, teachers, MPs or any number of other audiences. Whoever your
key audiences are, the monitoring and evaluation work needs to dovetail with them.
10. Prepare for the long haul
Raising awareness of a charity is no easy task, especially if the audience size is large and
the budget small. One of the key ingredients of success is for a charity to stick at it. Our
rule of thumb would be that a charity can raise awareness of its work with MPs in 6-12
months, but raising awareness amongst the general public will take 2-5 years, probably
even longer if the resources and consistency of strategy arent there. Put another way, if
a charity keeps changing its brand, its message and its focus every year or two, it
3

Other brand tracking services are available and we are always happy to do a proposal for you.
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shouldnt be surprised if nothing much changes about its brand awareness

Conclusion
Were sorry to those who wanted a nice straight-forward story about raising awareness
and how it drives up fundraising income directly, simply and incontrovertibly. Sadly, the
data did not show such simple relationships. To go back to one of our earlier
comparisons with revision for exams, not every child who revises hard does well in
exams, and not every child who does well in exams revises hard. Its important to
remember, though, that the majority do, and the same is true for awareness and
income. There are few well-known charities that dont have a substantial voluntary
income, and there are very few charities with a substantial income that arent wellknown. However, neither is a guarantee of the other.
The right response to this is not to despair, or conclude that awareness doesnt matter.
We think that the right response to our data and our report is to be more strategic, not
less. Brand strategies need to focus on the awareness element, i.e. the quantity of
people who know about a charitys brand, as much as they focus on the quality of
peoples brand knowledge.
We hope that this report will help branding and communications professionals in
charities to persuade their colleagues to become more focused, more disciplined and
more organised.

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Methodology
We sampled 59 charities from Caritas Datas top 100 fundraising charities. These were
the charities that we have awareness data on from our Charity Awareness Monitor and
therefore the sample does not include organisations that are technically charities but
receive most of their funding from statutory sources or earned income. The annual
income of these charities ranged from 1m to 500m, with voluntary incomes of
between 0.5m and 370m.
Financial data was collected from Caritas Datas Charity Financials website, which uses
official Charity Commission accounts. The data covers the years from 2009 to 2013, so
for some charts in the topline section, each charity will be represented five times - once
for each set of annual accounts.
Media spend figures were provided by Nielsen and represent rate card prices. While in
reality most charities will pay below this price for their media, this method provides the
only way of comparing media spend across different organisations with different
accounting practices. Annual media spend for the charities analysed in this report ranged
from 0 to 20m.
The data was collected by Leila Royle-Davies from CharityComms and Kate CranstonTurner from nfpSynergy, while the analysis was carried out by Cian Murphy of
nfpSynergy. The opinion and didactic polemic is from Joe Saxton. We are happy to share
the list of charities in the sample with those who are interested.
Contact cian.murphy@nfpsynergy.net for more information on any aspect of this project.

Statistical terms
Correlation A correlation is a statistical relationship between two variables or two sets
of data while it can establish that two things are related, it does not
automatically follow that one causes the other.
Regression Regression is a technique closely related to correlation which can model
the relationship between two variables. In this report, we have used
linear regression (a straight line relationship) and log-transformed
regression (to model a logarithmic relationship these can be identified
by the curved lines).
r
This is a figure which measures the strength of the relationship between
two variables. The r score indicates what proportion of the variation in
one variable is attributable to the relationship between the two, with the
strength of the relationship increasing as the figure gets closer to 1.
p
This score determines whether two variables are significantly correlated
or not. If p is less than 0.05, we can say that a relationship is significant
at the 95% confidence level.
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About nfpSynergy
nfpSynergy is a research consultancy that aims to provide the ideas, the insights and the
information to help non-profits thrive.
We have over a decade of experience working exclusively with charities, helping them
develop evidence-based strategies and get the best for their beneficiaries. The
organisations we work with represent all sizes and areas of the sector and we have
worked with 40 of the top 50 fundraising charities in the UK.
We run cost effective, syndicated tracking surveys of stakeholder attitudes towards
charities and non-profit organisations. The audiences we reach include the general
public, young people, journalists, politicians and health professionals. We also work with
charities on bespoke projects, providing quantitative, qualitative and desk research
services.
In addition, we work to benefit the wider sector by creating and distributing regular free
reports, presentations and research on the issues that charities face.

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