This month we’ve had the great pleasure of inviting fellow founder, marketing expert and all round force for good Ned Wells to share his experience of marketing for charities. The work charities do in the UK is a vital part of our social fabric. It has been tested and squeezed in recent years, largely due to the pandemic and the cost of living crisis. If you’re a commercial marketer looking to partner with a brilliant cause or a charity leader looking for marketing support this is the blog post for you. Pour a refreshing beverage and get stuck into some useful insights from Ned below.
All organisations need to do marketing. After all, marketing is about making people aware that you can help them. That means it is a broad church. And with digital media potentially offering global access for free, marketing is a powerful tool that can be used for good and less good ends. Whilst it’s created unimaginable wealth and prosperity it’s also driven massive over-consumption (ever heard of Earth Overshoot Day?)
So how do charities deal with marketing? That’s a question I started asking myself in 2018 after many years of working in commercial marketing. I was feeling an increasing desire to support organisations with social or environmental purpose - those that put purpose before profit, if you like. Charities seemed just the sorts of organisations I wanted to work for. It turns out there are some significant differences as well as similarities between commercial and charity marketing. Here are three:
So that sounds like a similarity then! Well, yes and no. There are two similarities in marketing across all small organisations. First, the main outcome they want is to bring in revenue. This allows charities to deliver their charitable aims and companies to support the costs of supplying their goods or services. Irrespective of the type of organisation the smaller it is the more it’ll have to focus on a narrow range of tactics: there’s never much time for anything in a small organisation and with marketing it’s better to do fewer things well.
The second is that it’s all about persuasion: sales psychology and building trust. The question is: what do you want to persuade people to do? How can charities begin to engage with people who’ve never heard of them, and then build their trust to the extent that they take part in a challenge, make a gift in their will, or make a donation via a form on the website? Equally, how can businesses begin to engage with people who’ve never heard of them, and then build their trust to the extent that they buy their thing?
Let’s now turn to the differences. Well for smaller charities, marketing normally means fundraising. If there’s a dedicated member of staff their job title may well be Fundraising Manager. Different types of fundraising are specialisms in their own right: organising a charity challenge (like runs, swims, walks and cycle rides) takes a very different skill set to apply for grants from Trusts and Foundations. So a Fundraising Manager in a small charity may be more experienced in one type than another. Many fundraising specialisms depend on ‘digital’ techniques such as content marketing, paid and organic search, social media and so forth.
In smaller businesses, marketing means generating sales enquiries or e-commerce product sales. Different products and services within those broad categories will be more or less suited to different marketing disciplines such as content marketing, paid and organic search, social media and so forth. Exactly the same as for charities?
Well, the tools, techniques, and outcomes (revenue into the organisation) may be the same, but the context is different: ‘buy this thing for yourself’, versus ‘give money to this good cause’.
It gets more confusing still…
Better Start Bradford is a charity that aims to improve the lives of children in specific Bradford post-code areas. It does this by providing early intervention programs for pregnant women and families with young children. Funded by the National Lottery Community Fund to the tune of £49 million over ten years, the charity doesn’t need to engage in fundraising. But it does need to raise awareness amongst its stakeholder groups and this work is done by a busy Communications team. The team promotes the charity’s services through events, campaigns, a website, social media, email and offline marketing. Now for people who work in businesses, that sounds like marketing…
The thing is, for businesses the word ‘marketing’ aligns closely with sales. It’s about identifying what sorts of investments will deliver high-value enquiries - or e-commerce sales - for the least cost and, therefore, the highest profit.
People who work in charities can find this sort of language horrifying. When they think of sales they may think of Delboy. They might characterise ‘profit’ as money that’s paid to anonymous shareholders in reward for driving over-consumption (see above re Earth Overshoot Day). You can make the discussion more palatable by moving it to one about generating a surplus from delivering a socially or environmentally valuable service. A surplus is a profit in that it’s the difference between the cost of delivering a service and the money you can make from it. But in a charity, it won't be distributed to shareholders.
Of course, not all charities dislike the word ‘marketing’. Groundwork, a UK-based federation of charities, runs an energy-saving advice service called Green Doctor. Housing Associations and Local Authorities buy services from Green Doctor to help their residents stay warm, stay well, and save money on household bills. Revenue from Green Doctor can be used to sustain and build the organisation as sadly, there’s huge demand, and the surplus can be used to fund Groundwork’s charitable services. It’s a great service and I was delighted to be asked to help them design and deliver their marketing approach to spreading the word and bringing in new enquiries.
With the increased cost of living, and austerity, fundraising is getting harder. Increasingly innovative charities such as Groundwork are exploring ways to diversify their income. And that requires marketing.
As organisations grow, the number and variety of people involved grows too. Businesses will have more employees, customers, suppliers, partners, investors and longer supply chains. Charities will have more employees, beneficiaries, communities of donors and benefactors, suppliers, partners and related professional services. Whatever the organisation they may become known by a wider public and have to be more thoughtful about messaging and their brand.
In commercial and public sector organisations this is the Communications domain. It’ll sit alongside marketing and use many of the same digital tools and channels. It may also be responsible for areas such as PR and employee communications.
And what about larger charities? I looked at ten UK-based charities with fundraising revenues of between £10m and £20m in 2021 (source). Here are the job titles of their most senior marketing roles:
Action for Children (£17.8M): 'Managing Director for Fundraising, Communications and Policy'
Guide Dogs for the Blind (£10.7M): 'Chief Marketing and Fundraising Officer'
Macmillan Cancer Support (£18.8M): 'Director of Communications'
Mind (£17.7M): 'Associate Director of External Relations’ (oversees all of Mind’s marketing and communications)
Royal Academy of Arts (£12.3M): 'Head Of Communications'
Royal National Lifeboat Institution (£11.5M): 'Director of Fundraising, Marketing, and Media'
Royal Shakespeare Company (£10.5M): 'Head of Media and Communications'
Save the Children Fund (£13.5M): 'Executive Director of Fundraising & Marketing'
Shelter (£10.9M): 'Director of Campaigns, Policy, and Communications'
Zoological Society of London (£12.4M): 'Chief Operating Officer (oversees Marketing and Communications)'
So, at the most senior level ‘marketing’ doesn’t often appear in a job title (three out of the above 10) but it is called out as part of the role.
Thanks Ned 👌 and congratulations dear reader, for making it this far. As you have gathered, while the fundamentals of marketing in the commercial and charity sectors are shared, the definition and remit of marketing is specialist and essential for a charity’s survival.
Ned is an Outsourced Marketing Director. He helps purpose-driven scale-up organisations to grow. If you need someone to clarify your marketing strategy and then mentor your staff to deliver it, look no further. You can get in touch with Ned: ned@cicadaconsult.co.uk .
Comments