With Madeleine Kind
Regularly operating with limited budgets and high moral projects, charities are under pressure to always get marketing right. Absorbing empathy into your approach can simplify this process whilst enabling you to adopt a long-term connection with your audience.
Understand your audience
Empathy builds trust with your audience, increases your chances of influencing, positively affects brand reputation, and increases customer loyalty. To do this, you require emotional intelligence in understanding the two different target audiences of your charity: financial and non-financial supporters. Is your next article on attracting donor acquisition? Or is it to increase the engagement of your organisation? Creating compelling content shouldn’t be hard selling; this can put potential donors off. Volunteers, for example, are more than twice as likely to go on to donate than non-volunteers.
LISTEN TO THEM
To understand your audience, you must listen to them. Use your marketing to address the motivations and underlying feelings that is revealed by your user research.
Although in marketing you may rarely interact with the audience face-to-face, it is important not to forget that when we send out messages, they are going to real human beings – not numbers or pieces of data. By shifting this mindset, we have both an opportunity and responsibility for positive impact through the marketing we use.
Consider what you can do to engage current and future beneficiaries and supporters of your cause on a human level. What do they find exciting, relevant, and beneficial?
SHOW RESPECT FOR ALL PARTIES
Your audience will likely consist of both beneficiaries and supporters of your cause. Making sure your tone is appropriate is one important approach. Ensure your advertising is engaging and compelling. If you use shock value, ensure it is well-considered, and think about how you may be able to use other approaches such as humour or being educational.
BE MINDFUL OF THE WORLD AROUND US
One example we can all relate to is the cost-of-living crisis. It is important to be sensitive to the fact that everyone is experiencing different challenges, and not everyone can always prioritise giving to charity. In times of widespread difficulty, being less forceful in your marketing may help people trust you long-term and support you later. In these times, people may be more likely to give what they do have when your marketing has a more hopeful tone.
SHOW THAT YOU ARE HUMAN TOO
This could include your charity’s values, your staff and volunteers, and personal testimonials of your charitable work. Storytelling has long been a technique to getting your audience to understand and relate to something better. This can be in the form of animations, videos, interviews etc.
You should be running the approach that you are building a human-to-human approach as opposed to a business-to-business approach.
BE CLEAR AND TRANSPARENT
Your audience can understand you best if your communications are as clear as possible. Avoid using long, difficult words and jargon, and be transparent about your organisation and its operations. If your charity makes a mistake, take responsibility.
Part of being clear is also making sure your marketing tools are as accessible as possible – for example using simple fonts, using captions or auto-captioning for videos, and using content and trigger warnings.
GET CREATIVE
Get creative and get inspired! Stay curious to how other organisations gain success in their marketing. Your charity may be able to use this as inspiration that might spark the curiosity of your intended audience.
For certain charitable purposes, using humour may be appropriate. Empathising through humour, if done with care, could be a powerful way for your charity to connect with beneficiaries and supporters – as well as potentially being educational for some.
Find the balance
Empathetic marketing is about finding the balance between understanding your audience and helping your audience to understand you. You can personalise your marketing to what your particular audience finds most exciting, relevant, and beneficial – but charities should also be true to themselves, honest, and authentic.
Keep this in mind and use the above ideas to foster a strong and enduring relationship with your audience. How can you adapt your marketing strategy to encompass empathy?
Your call to action
Find a cause you care about and act today. Whether that’s signing a petition, making a single donation, or signing up for a campaign.
What do you think? Get in touch at: hello@percivalrecruitment.org