If you’re a big charity, something like this may have happened to you: A high-powered, well-known commercial advertising agency would like to create some advertising for you.

Possibly pro bono. (Free! Though it would be smart to take a close look at the “deal” to make sure it really is all the way pro bono.)

People in your C-suite have stars in their eyes. This proposal is from an agency legendary for their ground-breaking creativity. They have state-of-the-art offices everywhere! They go to Cannes, SXSW, and TED conferences every year! They know how to party and spend money! It’s a glamor overload!

Plus they promise to do something for you that will transform your fundraising revenue. Usually by tapping into a vast population of young people who are not active donors to anything. You’ll own these people and their vast spending power! And you’ll be able to jettison your boring old fundraising that’s aimed at older people – the audience that’s holding you back!

If you’re not a big charity, you might have a similar experience, but with a not-so-famous agency, and they probably want to bill for their work. The glamor isn’t as high. But the promise of transforming your fundraising and tapping into a whole new market of (young) donors is just as big.

I’ve had front-row seat to this process a few times. Let me tell you about one experience…

I was working at the organization’s decidedly un-glamorous direct-response agency. We worked waaaay “below the line” on crusty old-school channels aimed largely at people over the age of 65.

We were doing good work that was bringing in donors and solid net revenue.

But: Boring

No international junkets. (Though I did go to quite a few refugee camps and famine zones. Zero glamor.) No glamorous parties. No celebrities.

It also meant working at the slow pace of direct mail testing, where the time between strategizing and getting test results is months. And change is incremental and slow.

And with messaging and design aimed squarely at our older supporters. That is not exactly spine-tingling for the mainly under-40 staff at the client.

So when the proposal came in for a massive awareness campaign, my client was all over it.

I drank the Kool-Aid too.

I could picture a sea-change in awareness and connection with my client and their cause. That would create a super-charged atmosphere for our fundraising. Instead of having to persuade people to donate entirely based on what we could fit in one envelope, we’d be talking to people who were already “aware” of the organization. And already caring about the cause.

Fast-forward a few months.

The awareness campaign rolled out.

The spend wasn’t nearly as big as the agency proposed, but it was bigger than anything the organization had ever done before.

What happened with fundraising?

Nothing.

It continued to work exactly as before.

Oh, except for one direct mail test. It was entirely based on the same messaging, look, and feel of the awareness campaign. If anything was going to work, it would be this test… Right?

Right?

No. The “branded” direct mail test got the worst results I’ve ever seen in my many years of direct mail.

Thousands of hours of people time at my client … for nothing.

Huge media spends … for nothing.

(We had a pretty cool launch party, though.)

It would be easy to say the awareness campaign was incompetently designed. That it failed because it was lousy.

I don’t think so. It was good stuff.

It didn’t work because it was the wrong tool for the goal.

Deploying awareness advertising to boost fundraising is like using a hammer to wash your windows.

Suppose you are bringing in donors at a break-even rate. I know, that doesn’t happen much these days, but it makes the math for this thought experiment easier!

That is, the total you raise in the acquisition campaign is the same that you spend on it. Let’s say it costs $50 for each new donor, and the average gift of these new donors is $50, yielding a 1:1 ROI.

Let’s say last year your budget for this acquisition channel was $500,000. You got 10,000 new donors. A percentage of those people will continue to give. Some of them at high levels, and few will leave you large sums in their wills.

This year, your new Marketing VP wants to reallocate your $500k spend so it’s $300,000 on fundraising and $200,000 on a brilliant awareness campaign. The awareness campaign will improve the results of the fundraising campaign. How can it not? You’ll end up ahead. Way ahead!

Will you?

For the sake of argument, let’s say the awareness campaign really is over-the-top amazing. So great that it measurably improves your fundraising results by 10%. (Keep in mind I’ve never seen anything like that happen, but let’s suspend disbelief for the same of this analysis.)

In that scenario, your fundraising campaign brings in 6,600 new donors.

Not bad? Hold your horses. Those 6,600 donors, with their $50 average gift, gave a total of $330,000. A cost of $500,000. You spent $26 for every new donor.

But remember: You spent nothing for every new donor last year.

This year, with an effective awareness campaign helping out, you got fewer donors and less revenue for the same about spent.

For the awareness campaign to be a net positive, it would have to improve fundraising by 67%. If you’ve been in fundraising for more than a couple of years, you know how unlikely that is.

And the reality is that most awareness campaigns make no measureable difference for fundraising campaigns. In fact, I’ve seen a couple of times where the presence of an awareness campaign drove down fundraising results!

The truth is, if you have limited resources, there’s almost no way you can justify spending money on awareness campaigns.

Donors – people who actively said yes with their wallets – are the most usefully aware people you can possibly get. And you get people to that state by simply asking them to give … and doing a good job at that.

Don’t waste your time and money on awareness campaigns.

Accomplish your goal by doing fundraising campaigns.

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