Getting The Most Out Of Your Charity Advertising Campaign + Examples

Charity campaigns can take many different forms; whether it’s raising awareness of an issue, fundraising, or getting people to take a specific action. With a clearly defined purpose, most charities have a major head start in retaining loyal audiences. But in a world where engagement rates are diminishing, how can you connect with new audiences with your charity advertising campaign? How do you overcome compassion fatigue? And once you’ve got someone’s attention, how do you translate this into action?

Charity advertising tips

We’ve put together our key learnings and techniques from working within the charity sector, providing advice on how to advertise your charity effectively.

Define your Objective

First and foremost, it’s crucial to identify what it is you are trying to achieve. Usually we can break this down into a few key areas:

• Awareness (of an issue)
• Awareness (of the charity)
• Fundraising (donations)
• Supporter action (sign-ups or events)

While we know that almost every charity is looking to do all of these at any one time, a campaign is most effective if it has a single minded message. It’s important to give your audience a clear outtake with a tangible and measurable goal.

Define your Audience

It might sound obvious, but understanding who you want your message to reach is critical to the success of your charity campaign. It can be tempting to target ‘everyone’, but the best charity awareness campaigns gain results from honing in on a specific group of people with a similar set of behaviours. For example, it might be that you feel you have a highly loyal audience of women aged 60+, but you’re looking for younger supporters to spread an awareness message.Social listening is a great place to start in understanding how your audience behaves, identifying the channels your audience uses and what content they are engaging with. However, often the best insights come from a simple face to face; primary research using focus groups and surveys reveals simple human truths which can be tapped into to guide the creative direction.

Call to Action

Once you know who your audience is, you need to consider what you want them to do. Applying a ‘Theory Of Change’ to your campaign can help give your audience the sense that their small action is having a wider impact on society. By giving them an output, like a petition which could ladder up to legislative change, or a mechanic to contact their local MP, your audience will feel more inclined to get involved. It’s about showing them they have the power to make a worthwhile difference beyond a share or a like.

Reframe the Narrative

Relevancy is key for engagement and for ensuring your concept lands with your target audience. If your campaign is out of touch with the times, it’s likely to be out of touch with its audience. Therefore, think about ways to tap into the zeitgeist. The most innovative charity campaigns will often take part in already existing discourse or cultural expression.Equally important to cut-through is looking at how to reframe well trodden narratives. How are other charities and causes talking about the issue? How can you tell the story in a different way? Often this means a shift away from typically ‘bleaker’ more emotive charity ad formats; humour can be a useful tool when shifting perceptions, for example. For more on emotive charity advertising, check out our blog on how to do emotional advertising right.

Start with Social

Social media campaigns for charities allow youto reach a highly targeted audience on a smaller budget than more expensive broadcast channels like TV or cinema. Social media targeting allows you to reach people in an environment where they are open to conversation and avoids wasting your budget. However, if you do plan on taking the campaign to bigger screens, social media is a great place to test out which audiences are responding before investing in more expensive media outlets.

Let’s Recap

To recap, here’s a basic charity marketing strategy template:

1. What’s the objective of your campaign?
2. Get to know your target audience. Figure out what makes them tick and what appeals to them.
3. Call to action. How can we apply a theory of change?
4. Pick your media outlets. Start with social and scale up based on learnings.

Charity Marketing Campaign Examples

So, those are our top tips! Now let’s take a look at some charity campaign ideas. Here are some of our best charity marketing campaign examples, the idea behind them and the results.

Uprooted - UNHCR

The idea: At a time when the global displacement crisis had reached 100 million people worldwide, we collaborated with UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency and Stink Films to send a message of support to all refugees around the world, with a film featuring and made with Ukrainian refugees.The hero film “Uprooted” is accompanied by a further trilogy of films where we meet the Ukrainian refugee cast and crew, shedding light on their first hand experiences of the trauma of war and the constant reliving of devastating memories of it. In total, over 50 refugees from Ukraine were involved in the project. The result: the films received over 9 million views, 227 engagements and over 5 million impressions.

The Wind in the Willows - The Wildlife Trusts

The idea: We wanted to raise awareness about wildlife depletion in the UK, but without being overly bleak. Our research showed that people are less receptive nowadays to overly preachy messaging or guilt-inducing attacks. To counter this, we took much loved characters from a popular childhood tale, and transported them into a dystopian 2019. The result: Over 190 pieces of media coverage, a 60% engagement rate, featured in cinemas nationwide and over 1 million online views.

The Drive - Shelter

The idea: We needed to raise funds for the hundreds of thousands of people spending Christmas without a home. We created an emotive film that subverted the typical “us and them” narrative, instead capturing the raw reality of being homeless at Christmas, based on genuine stories. The film depicted a mum trying to cheer up her sulky teenage daughter with a singalong of “Last Christmas” by Wham on their drive home. However, after this touching moment of togetherness, you soon saw that for them, “home” was the vehicle itself, pulled up in a dark and dingy car park.The results: A total of £1.3 million in donations and a 60% increase in Facebook donations. In addition, the campaign resulted in a 41% increase in TV PPC.

Most Shocking Second A Day – Save The Children

The idea: We understood that often the public finds it hard to connect with what they see on television or in the news – especially when the message is incredibly bleak. To get UK citizens to engage with what was happening in Syria, we decided to bring the Syrian refugee crisis home. We used a popular, and relevant, second-a-day format to engage with parents and show the crisis in a painfully familiar setting. The campaign struck an international chord, and became one of the most successful charity films of all time. The Result: 150 million views, 2.5 million shares, 93% uplift in fundraising during the campaign

Everything is NOT Awesome – Greenpeace

The idea: Greenpeace were struggling to engage new supporters as marketing was perceived to be overzealous and off-putting. They wanted to end a destructive partnership between Lego and Shell, fearing the catastrophic impact Shell could have on the environment. So, we engaged wider support by swapping outrage for empathy, showing childhood favourite lego characters being destroyed by an oil spill. The result: The partnership ended between Shell and Lego, over 50k petition signatures were received and Greenpeace experienced a 75% new audience engagement rate.

To conclude

When it comes to advertising campaigns, charities need to be clear about what they stand for and be able to show how we, the public, can actively make a difference too – always coming back to the Theory of Change, and giving your audience a sense of agency in helping to fight for an issue.With so much noise to contend with, the best charity campaigns need to be current, bold and above all, prepared to take a calculated creative risk; stepping away from traditional narratives is key to generating meaningful results.

We can help

If you’re still wondering how to advertise a charity, we can help! It’s kind of what we do. Check out our non-profit and charity advertising campaigns here or if you’re ready to start a conversation get in touch.