Raising Awareness As A Charity: Our Top Tips

Raising awareness for your nonprofit is like tending to a campfire. It's not a quick spark that then dies out; but rather, it requires continuous attention and careful addition of fuel at the right times. Just as you feed the fire with wood to keep it burning, you need to consistently feed your efforts with strategies and engagement techniques to keep the awareness of your organisation alive and glowing over time.Keeping a fire alight is difficult, but in this article we will walk you through the best ways to raise awareness of a charity; enhancing visibility will lead to higher rates of engagement and fundraising.

Understanding the Importance of Raising Awareness for Nonprofits

Why Awareness Matters:

Awareness is a crucial part of any nonprofit’s mission. It’s the first step in engaging an audience to support your work, building a community to drive positive change and inspiring people to take action. Without being aware of the issues that your nonprofit combats, people are unable to be a part of the solution. The relationship between donors and charities starts with making people aware of your work. People don’t tend to throw large amounts of their money blindly into the abyss- they want to know what your organisation does and why your mission is important, otherwise they won’t be motivated to support it, no matter how many times you ask. Your goals and how you intend to achieve them must be communicated clearly and confidently to get donors on board and to create reliable, long lasting relationships with them.

Challenges and Obstacles:

When considering how to raise awareness for nonprofit organisations, there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ solution, or, if we want to put it in fancy economist terms, the fallacy of composition arises when presuming that strategies effective for one charity will produce the same results for all organisations. Running into the shoe shop and grabbing the first pair of shoes you see, is most likely going to leave you walking around with severe blisters.Particularly when it comes to smaller charities, raising awareness can be a bit trickier. For one, they often lack the financial cushion to gamble on new approaches, as their reserves are more limited to face potential setbacks. Secondly, if they’re not carrying a well-known brand name, it can be challenging to get their voice heard amongst all the noise of global organisations and convince people to contribute funds to their specific cause.

What Success Looks Like:

But how do charities raise awareness successfully? Well, let’s take the example of the ALS Ice bucket challenge.You might remember the 2014 internet craze of squealing people in their gardens whilst friends or family poured a huge bucket of ice over them, to raise money for the ALS association. What you might not know however, is that over 17 million people participated in the challenge, raising over $115 million for the charity. It didn’t become such a global success by chance, there were several important contributing factors. Firstly, there was an authentic, human element to the campaign. The very visible reactions of those participating made us as an audience laugh and smile; it was a form of harmless entertainment that produced a great fundraising response. This idea of visibility was key to the campaign’s success. Video is a highly engaging medium and therefore a great way to communicate to an audience. Through compelling visuals, the campaign managed to captivate viewers and leave a lasting impression. We’ll go into more detail about the impact of visual media later on in this article.Finally, the campaign gained rapid online momentum, growing exponentially with each new participant, as the strategy involved challenging three friends to join and encouraging them to participate. The allure of a challenge, especially one that's enjoyable, harmless, and benefits a worthy cause, made people more readily willing to support.Finding the right audience and knowing how to ask potential donors are important aspects of raising awareness. Granted, not every charity is able to start a viral campaign that raises hundreds of millions of dollars. But, as we mentioned, each charity must find an approach that works for them, and here at Don’t Panic, we will help you to do just that.

How to Raise Awareness for Nonprofit Organisations

Marketing Strategies for Charities:

Nonprofit marketing is a busy, competitive space, particularly when you add in for-profits selling products into the mix; it’s difficult to get your message heard and understood by the right people. The best way to get noticed and generate interest is to push out your message to potential supporters across multiple platforms. The aim is to be everywhere- without being too ‘in your face’ with your campaign. Tricky, we know.However, content marketing strategies can position your organisation as an authority while subtly guiding the audience towards your work. It helps you steer clear of coming on too strong with your mission and just seeming to chase after donor’s money.Think of your website as the hive; it’s the base where you want people to be drawn back to. There are many ways to guide people to it, such as posting regular blog posts that focus on why your organisation is a go-to source of information. The Feeding America Hunger Blog is a great example of successful blog posts; sharing posts that feature personal, emotive stories brings the charity’s work to life and encourages donors to engage with their work.You can also show off your expertise through a sustained and authoritative social media presence. Understanding each platform’s algorithm and making sure to use SEO practices are surefire ways to draw in traffic, and reach a large audience with your organisation’s mission.Another way to get the word out is through email marketing. While people usually think of it as an insidious undertaking businesses use to harass people to make more money, nonprofits can use email marketing to effectively spread their message. Newsletters are in fact one of the most trustworthy and successful strategies for nonprofits in terms of producing high returns.Increasing your support base through email marketing is an effective way to boost contributions and event attendance. However, it’s got to be expertly done in order to avoid it becoming another whisper in a crowded room; left in the sad heap of unopened spam messages at the bottom of people’s mailboxes. Email marketing must tell a compelling story to illustrate the impact of your charity’s work and emotionally resonate with the audience.

Visual Content and Engagement:

How to raise awareness for a charity largely hinges on one factor: make the most of visual content. It’s a surefire way to communicate complex knowledge in an easily digestible format. Producing visual content is more eye-catching than plain text and can allow an audience to connect to your cause on a deeper level as it evokes emotion in a way that is more likely to inspire action. Images and videos have an incredible ability to build a narrative through storytelling. It is even thought that visuals are processed by the brain 60,000 faster than plain text is. With this in mind, it is crucial to harness this creative power to encourage engagement with your nonprofit’s work.Infographics, in particular, have the ability to effectively communicate the urgency of greater support for your nonprofit’s mission, as you will see in our Trussell Trust campaign later on in this article. Meanwhile, images or videos of your beneficiaries can tug at the heart strings of your audience and evoke the emotional response necessary to prompt action.

Utilising Fundraising Events:

If your website is your digital hive, fundraising events are your physical hive. It’s all about exposure; putting your work in the limelight will transform those images and infographics into a relatable, concrete cause that people can easily connect with. Planning fundraising galas, auctions, seminars, or charity runs creates a buzz around your nonprofit's initiatives, establishes a strong presence within the community and increases the chances of new potential donors flying towards that digital hive.Participating in popular events has the same effect. Consistently showing your face in these spaces helps to forge pathways with community members and can go a long way for helping you in your future endeavours. Ensure that your branding is well presented and consistent is key in order to present your nonprofit as a respectable organsiation is worth other people’s time and investment.

Donor Engagement Strategies:

So, members of your community might be thoroughly engaged with your work, (if you followed our guide as gospel of course), however the big question remains: what can you do to increase engagement with donors and boost funds to help your nonprofit achieve its goals? Donors, as you are probably aware of at this stage, aren’t endless money pits that will throw money at your cause at the press of a button. Although that would make life a whole lot easier. In fact, they’re the ones that are reading your emails and sharing your advocacy campaign to others. And, because of such, the relationships with them must be nurtured over time, so that they bloom and both of you consequently benefit and grow. It’s important to make your support base feel appreciated; personal phone calls for example can create a sense of appreciation and recognition amongst donors.Keep them in the loop; be transparent and explicit in how you are using their funds and the impact that you will have on the community. Showcasing their endorsements builds credibility for your organisation by demonstrating the positive impact of their support and also helps to make them feel like valued partners.

Tools and Platforms for Raising Awareness

Now you have a basic understanding of how to raise awareness for a nonprofit, you might still be a bit unsure on where to start. Don't worry, stick around, as we're about to share a bunch of useful tips, tricks, and techniques for effectively using email, social media, and content strategies to boost awareness for nonprofit organisations.

Email List Management:

As we have established, email marketing is an important tool in your arsenal. But you might be wondering how best to curate an impactful campaign. Fear not, for we have created a guide that will ensure that your emails will captivate your audience and increase engagement with your mission.To understand your audience and target them with relevant information, it’s important to gather data using different metrics to discover who your readers are and how they act. From signing up to an email list, to reading your emails, to taking action, every process is important to track. Some people love to sit on the train in the morning and peruse through their inbox to kickstart their day. Others tend to wait until the weekend at home, cat in lap, coffee in hand, before they have a scroll through on their laptops to catch up on internet content they might have missed during the week. These seemingly mundane pieces of information, in reality, hold great value when creating an email marketing campaign geared towards optimal readership and engagement. Your organisation must recognise these differences between audience members so that you can segment your email list. Factors such as donor history, interests and engagement levels also play a role and you must modify your content accordingly to ensure its relevance to different groups of people. Events are a great way to generate email lists. Attendees could be offered access to exclusive content such as downloadable, educative materials, in exchange for signing up to your email lists. Alternatively, registration is another option to get people involved. As they’re already partly engaged in your cause, it presents an opportune moment to keep them following your work in the future. It’s more important to create a support base with people that have a legitimate interest in your work, rather than a large pool of people that will end up unsubscribing or not engaging. Finally, and probably most importantly, don’t forget a punchy, attention-grabbing subject line, otherwise recipients won’t even open it in the first place.

Social Media Platforms:

Maximising the impact of social media for your nonprofit can sometimes be pretty bewildering, but it’s an important platform to raise awareness of your organisation.Firstly, start by identifying who your target audience are and then tailoring your content to their interests and preferences. Like email marketing, this will make sure that you are producing relevant information that people are more likely to read it. Through creating donor personas on what your ideal donor is like, it’s easier to shape your content with them in mind.Once you are aware of who your audience are you can showcase your organisation’s mission and impact by regularly sharing compelling stories, visuals, and updates on your progress. To add a personalised touch, engage with your audience by responding to comments, asking questions, and fostering conversations; this allows even the biggest organisations to appear less robot and more human to readers on the internet. Don't forget to track analytics so that you can refine your strategy based on what works best for you. By consistently offering meaningful content, engaging with your audience, and harnessing the power of online communities, you can use social media to make a lasting impact and increase awareness for your nonprofit organisation. Luckily for you, we’ve written more on how to grow your social media following that you can read about here.

Content Marketing Strategies:

Readers are bombarded with all different kinds of content every day, so there’s a tiny window for nonprofits to capture their attention and inspire them to engage with your organisation. Create a clear and concise content strategy that explains how you intend to increase online awareness of your organisation. Include how to optimise social media in your plan as a way of increasing referral traffic to your website. Your plan should also include easy-to-measure metrics such as how many people get involved, how often people click your links, how much your website visits grow, and how many people end up actually doing what you want them to do. This way, you can see if your plan is working and making a real difference.Think of creating content for your nonprofit as a spiderweb rather than isolated or linear steps. Email campaigns, social media posts, website optimisation and blog posts are all a part of your marketing ecosystem. Analysing the performance of each aspect of the web, as well as how they interplay with the other parts of your strategy will highlight which parts are performing well and which are in need of some adjustments. There might even be some dead flies stuck in your web that have no use. Don’t be scared. Throw them out.

Examples of Successful Nonprofit Awareness Campaigns

After reading this article, we can understand if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed. Alas, do not despair. Don’t Panic are here to hold your hand and walk you through the maze of how charities raise awareness. Take a look at some of our most successful campaigns to date.

Trussell Trust - It Doesn't Add Up

We harnessed the power of visual content for Trussell Trust by designing an eye-catching infographic displayed on a billboard. It aimed to grab the attention of passersby by featuring a massive receipt, prominently showcasing alarming statistics thst illustrated the shortcomings of Universal Credit in adequately addressing the costs of living.

The outcome? Reaching an audience of 5 million on digital platforms. How? By incorporating personalised stories of individuals facing the cost of living crisis. These stories played a pivotal role in making the crisis tangible and eliciting an emotional response from the audience.

Health Equals - Lives Cut Short

As part of the UK charity coalition, Health Equals, we helped design a campaign to make people pay attention to how our health is shaped by our environment. We used portraits of newborns wearing wristbands with their lowered life expectancy on, due to the area they live in.

It was incredibly successful: garnering 13 million social media impressions and welcoming 70,000 new users to the Lives Cut Short page. What made this campaign highly impactful was recognising the significance of grasping the audience's geographical context. Across social media, every post was tailored to a specific location, drawing from identical data points, ensuring the campaign resonated with the audience in different areas where it was seen. The strategic placement of billboards in Sheffield and Glasgow, cities with notably lower life expectancies compared to other UK urban centers, effectively heightened emotional engagement and fostered a stronger connection with the campaign.

Don't Panic - Larry 4 Leader

Lastly, our discussion of our successful endeavors would be incomplete without referencing Larry. To illustrate the profound flaws within the UK’s political system, we created the #LarryforLeader campaign, highlighting how a feline figure could amass more support than a human politician during the Truss vs Sunak election turmoil.

The achievement of this campaign can be attributed to multiple factors: the prominent visuals displayed on billboards and posters, guiding individuals to our dedicated microsite named "Larry 4 Leader," which drew an impressive 30,000 visits. Endorsement from the widely followed Twitter account @Number10Cat, coupled with extensive coverage from various global media outlets, played a pivotal role as well. Over 70 features across international media not only propelled it to viral fame but established it as a topic of worldwide conversation.

Key Takeaways

media, are key moves to boost awareness for nonprofits. Email marketing strategies allow you to have direct conversations with your supporters. Content creation is where you can create compelling stories and grab attention. Social media is your ticket to reaching more people and building a community. And don't forget the importance of visuals; pictures and videos are like the glitter that makes your message shine across all these channels. Ready to dive deeper into charity awareness campaigns? Don't hesitate – reach out to Don’t Panic today. We're here to provide you with comprehensive insights and expert guidance. Discover more about us and what it is we do here: https://www.dontpaniclondon.com/ Let's work together to create meaningful change!Harness the power of these tips and techniques to amplify your nonprofit's message. With email, content, social media, and visuals, you're not just raising awareness – you're creating a ripple of change that can have a lasting impact.