5 Principles for When It’s Time to Invest in a Charity’s Brand 

For many organisations, there comes a point when further investment in acquisition no longer delivers the same results. This period, often marked by slower growth and rising Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), can feel challenging as targets are missed and confidence ebbs.

Dubbed the “no-more efficient buys plateau” by Dr Grace Kite & Tom Roach, this is a stage where acquisition efforts have exhausted latent demand, signalling it’s time to shift focus towards expanding the demand pool. 

For charities, expanding the pool means raising the importance of the cause in the minds of more people, while also ensuring they see the organisation as a credible part of the solution. Achieving this can enhance how easily the charity is recalled and associated with donation opportunities—what we might call “Mental Availability.”

This is powerful for charity marketing. In our experience, charities with high mental availability often achieve excellent results simply by using their logo in acquisition campaigns on platforms like Meta. Put simply, their logo alone is enough to conjure the relevant thoughts and associations with the cause and inspire someone to donate.

However, while brand investment is powerful, it’s not a magic bullet. As with optimised acquisition campaigns, there are important lessons to be learned to ensure brand investment delivers its full potential. 

Here are our top 5 things to consider:

Brand investment should always be tied to business objectives, not just improving brand metrics. It’s important to have a clear understanding of how this investment will support core organisational goals. 

There needs to be a realistic expectation of when returns will be realised. A recent macro study by Thinkbox and Ebiquity showed that, on average, 58% of advertising’s impact occurs in the medium to long term (between 14 weeks and two years). Unrealistic short-term evaluation criteria can lead to cutting investment before its full potential is realised. 

Several studies have shown creative to be the biggest lever for ensuring advertising effectiveness. Most recently a joint paper from EatBigFish, Peter Field & System1 found that ads with the highest proportion of neutral emotional responses (extremely dull ads) could expect just a 1/10^th of the impact of a non-dull add. The investment needed across the advertising industry to bring those ads up to the effectiveness of the interesting ones? £7.94bn! 

Key to having high levels of mental availability is being distinctive in the mind of the audience, but it is very difficult to be distinctive without first being consistent. In an analysis of 1,500 campaigns by Ebiquity, long-running distinctive brand campaigns were found to deliver ROIs +62% versus the rest. Ebiquity also found that second and third bursts of campaigns on average generate ROIs 30% higher than the first burst, as they build on the brand recognition scores initially achieved. 

You can’t save souls in an empty church, and it is very difficult to build brand equity without sufficient investment. Many have noted reach as a key factor in what makes brand investment effective, however broader reach naturally comes with more significant costs. Whilst in a fragmented media age there are of course ways to have impact vs. smaller targets, but the strongest ROIs will come for those willing to invest in scale.