New research from the Data and Marketing Association (DMA) has revealed that charity marketing campaign effectiveness has reached a five-year low.
The Meaningful Marketing Measurement: Charity Sector Focus report – which draws on data from over 135 charity campaigns – has highlighted that charity campaign effectiveness has been declining in recent years.
Charity campaign effectiveness peaked at 3.4 effects per campaign in 2019, before dropping to 2.3 effects by 2021.
Despite charity marketers often hitting response-based KPI’s, it is actually a decline in response effectiveness that has prompted the overall effectiveness decline in 2021. The average number of response effects halved in just one year, dropping from 2.6 per campaign in 2020 to 1.3 in 2021.
The news comes as many households continue to feel the pinch of the cost of living crisis and struggle to find the extra money to give to charities like Cancer Research UK.
READ MORE: Marketing campaigns that include email are more effective, DMA reports
“Declining response effectiveness in a challenging market, where households budgets are under more pressure than ever, has inevitably played its part with the decline in total campaign effects generated,” DMA director of insight Tim Bond said.
“While other organisations grapple with the appropriateness of purpose-driven marketing, charities have no choice but to consider their purpose.”
Bond said charities are “tasked with creating deep-rooted emotional connections with consumers while asking them to part with their hard-earned cash, often for little reward other than a good sense of altruism.”
“Charity CMOs need to be armed with the data-driven insight to inform the role of marketing in building charity brands, while at the same time striving to measure and attribute campaign success more accurately at a time when budgets are under greater scrutiny than ever.”
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