High awareness, flat fundraising: Why charity brands don’t convert to donations

This article was originally published on F&P.

Many Australian charities have achieved what most commercial brands would envy: extraordinary awareness. They are deeply trusted. They generate attention at scale. They optimise for reach. Some are known by more than 80% of the public, and are a part of the national fabric of Australia.

And yet fundraising revenue remains stubbornly flat.

This is one of the most common and misunderstood problems in the sector. Awareness is often treated as the prize, but awareness is a vanity metric unless it shifts behaviour. You can grow impressions, followers, even media coverage, and still not grow income, because being known doesn’t automatically mean being chosen.

For fundraising leaders, this isn’t a theoretical issue. It shows up in rising acquisition costs, declining response rates, slower donor growth, acquisition of donors who will never give again, and retention that becomes harder to defend each year. The organisation feels visible, but the income line doesn’t follow.

The good news is that this problem is usually diagnosable, and fixable, when charities understand what brand is actually meant to do.

Brand isn’t awareness. It’s the reason people choose you.

In the charity sector, branding is often misunderstood as design or reputation-building.

But in reality, a strong brand is something much more practical: it makes the decision to support you feel natural, emotional and obvious to the donor.

The best commercial brands don’t just communicate what they sell. They create meaning, identity and emotional connection. Nike doesn’t simply sell shoes; it sells motivation and belonging. That’s why people choose it even when alternatives are cheaper.

Charities work in a similar way.

Strong fundraising brands don’t just communicate the cause. They communicate the role the supporter plays in solving it. They make donors feel needed and integral to the mission, not just informed. They also build trust quickly, showing donors your organisation is legitimate, that their money will make a difference, and that your values align with theirs. Clarity, consistency and proof of impact shorten the time it takes for someone to say yes. Brand also creates emotional relevance, not just recognition. Many charities chase familiarity — “Have you heard of us?” — but fundraising depends on urgency and connection: “Do I feel compelled to act right now?”.

Great charity brands are a revenue lever. They make giving feel like the obvious next step by guiding people from awareness to trust, trust to connection, and connection to action and loyalty.

The awareness trap

We regularly work with well known not-for-profits that have enormous brand equity and trust, yet fundraising performance remains stagnant. The diagnosis is usually simple: donations were never embedded into the brand identity.

Many charities position themselves primarily as service providers, research institutes or authorities in their field. But they can unintentionally remove the urgency for public support if the supporter’s role is never made clear.

The organisation becomes “the experts who handle it,” rather than “the cause that depends on people like me.”

If you build awareness without a clear giving proposition, you are building fame, not a fundraising pipeline. People may respect you, but they don’t instinctively understand that your work requires their contribution alongside your expertise.

The style trap: corporate or institutional branding

Another factor often compounds the problem. Many charity brands drift into one of two unhelpful styles.

The first is overly corporate branding: clean, professional, trustworthy and emotionally neutral. Trust is essential, but trust without warmth rarely motivates generosity.

The second is the ‘government department’ effect, particularly in organisations led by highly educated specialists. The brand becomes factual, technical and institutional. People may admire it, but they don’t feel personally invited into it.

Both styles create distance, and distance is deadly for fundraising. Giving is an emotional act, not a transactional one.

Why this is so hard to fix

These challenges are rarely tactical. They are cultural.

Many organisations have historically relied on government funding, so donor-first thinking feels unnatural. Leadership is often driven by program experts who want the brand to represent excellence and authority, and may feel uncomfortable making fundraising central.

But fundraising does not diminish authority. The strongest charity brands show that public trust, service delivery and supporter funding are interconnected. Donors are not a distraction from the mission. They are part of how the mission is delivered.

Fundraising is not a compromise of trust. It is an expression of it. When people give, they are demonstrating belief in your work and choosing to stand alongside it.

A simple Fundraising Brand Growth Framework

To turn awareness into revenue, charities need brands that do more than communicate mission. They must create a pathway that makes giving feel natural, urgent and obvious, while still supporting the organisation’s broader role in services, advocacy, and trusted information.

Fundraising leaders can apply this five-step framework immediately:

1. Position: Be the obvious choice

If you sound like every other charity, fundraising becomes a competition for attention. Strong brands are sharply positioned around a clear outcome, not a broad category.

2. Connect: Create emotional relevance

Recognition is not enough. Support grows when people feel compelled to act now, not simply informed about the issue.

3. Prove: Build trust with specificity

Trust is the currency of Australian giving. Credibility is earned through clarity, consistency and proof that feels human, not institutional.

4. Convert: Make giving the obvious next step

Brand must carry through the full supporter experience, from campaign to donation page to retention journey. Brand isn’t the billboard. It’s the full experience of giving.

Vision Australia does not just provide services; it invites Australians to help restore independence for people who are blind or have low vision. The Salvation Army does not simply respond to hardship; it represents a public movement of compassion and practical support. In both cases, authority and fundraising reinforce each other.

5. Sustain: Build momentum through donor identity

The fastest growth lever is not the first gift. It’s what happens after. High-performing brands make supporters feel: “People like me do this.” That identity drives second gifts, regular giving, advocacy and lifetime value.

Measuring what matters: beyond awareness

One of the clearest signs that brand investment is working is that it moves people along the path to donation, not just into recognition.

In the commercial world, tools like Tracksuit have helped organisations measure the journey from awareness to preference and choice. The lesson for charities is simple: we need to measure the same journey through a fundraising lens.

It’s not enough to know that 80% of Australians have heard of you. The real question is how many would choose to support you.

Fundraising leaders should track the gap between recognition, emotional connection, belief in the need for support, first-time giving and repeat giving. That gap is where brand strategy either succeeds or fails.

The bottom line

Fundraisers shouldn’t hate brand. They should demand better brand strategy, because when brand is done properly it is one of the most powerful tools a charity has to reduce friction, increase giving and build long-term sustainability.

Let’s stop chasing recognition for its own sake. Let’s build charity brands that convert awareness into revenue, while strengthening trust, services and mission delivery at the same time.