Three ways your non-profit business can maximise awareness ahead of giving season
The Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) has recently published its Corporate Giving Report 2025, and the findings make for an interesting read. Against a challenging economic background, it comes as no surprise that corporate giving has remained static with only 25% of UK businesses with a turnover of at least £250,000 giving to charity in 2024 (source: CAF).
Clearly, charities continue to face severe challenges as they search for new ways to encourage donations. As we countdown to the giving season, now is the perfect time for non-profit organisations to step-up their marketing and to communicate they need support.
What is ‘giving season’?
November and December are widely known as giving season as statistics show that charitable donations, both personal and corporate, spike at this time of year.
Research conducted by the Charities Aid Foundation in 2024 showed that “50% of the public always or usually donate to charity over the festive period” (source: CAF Online). There are a few reasons for this. National appeals such as Giving Tuesday, Children in Need and the Poppy Appeal all take place during the last quarter. It’s also a traditional time to give being the start of the season of goodwill.
With nearly a third of the wider business population claiming their donations are likely to increase in the 2025/26 financial year (source: CAF), now is the perfect time to start planning and implementing your PR and Marketing campaign to maximise awareness this giving season. Read on to discover three ways to get started.
1. Know your target audience
First, make sure you know who you are targeting. This enables you to identify exactly where you want to be seen. For example, if you are a local charity and you find that many of your donors are located in the South West, you could run a social media advertising campaign targeting the South West region only. Keen to reach those with particular interests? Research the trade media that could help amplify your messaging to a specific audience.
Team Absolute recently worked with the Exe Sailability Project, a charity that provides disadvantaged people with access to sailing. The Project was honoured with a King’s Award for Voluntary Service, and it was our job to get this fantastic news out into the public domain. Not only did we generate media coverage amongst regional media, but we secured pieces in the trade sailing press too, totalling a circulation of over 185m. Make sure your messaging is getting in front of the right journalists/consumers and you’re more likely to experience success.
2. Step up your social media game
The power of social media is incredible. As of January 2025, 79% of the total UK population use social media (source: Sprout Social). Social media platforms present an excellent opportunity to reach a national audience without having to spend thousands on multi-media campaigns, but you have to put the work in.
Absolute’s top tips on how to craft engaging social media content to make an impact:
- Focus on creating content that explains why you need support during giving season.
- Make sure messaging clearly highlights how a donation can help others, creating that emotional connection.
- Strike the perfect balance between posting regularly and not over-saturating your feed. You want to keep and nurture your followers, not encourage them to click that unfollow button.
- Think about your visuals. Have a go at creating short, engaging videos or use tools such as Canva to design a graphic that pops.
- Engage with your online community. Ensure to respond to comments from your followers, reply to direct messages in a timely manner and interact with local businesses. Keep them informed to make them feel like they are part of your important work. We love how Exeter Foodbank engages with its Facebook followers. They are a great example of a charity that regularly posts, keeping their followers updated. They post their ‘shopping list’ on Facebook so their supporters know what items they urgently need and demonstrate how donations are helping the less fortunate.
- Consider social media advertising. We know budgets at a non-profit organisation will be tight, but £20, can go a long way where social media advertising is concerned. Consider running a boosted post on Facebook to get your key message for the giving season out there. You have the potential to target thousands of people with a small budget – it’s much more cost-effective compared to media advertising.
3. Tell your story
Giving season has the potential to bring a new audience to your door. As consumers become more receptive to charitable messages, you may find that you have even more ears willing to listen as they decide who to support at this charitable time of year.
This is an opportunity to tell your story. Create content that celebrates your roots, explains why the organisation was founded and how it has helped make a difference in the world. Dive deep and don’t be afraid to reveal the faces behind your non-profit organisation. We thrive on human, emotional connections, so make sure you use that! Tell your story through a magazine feature article, press release, social media content, multi-media advertising or video to maximise awareness this giving season. Storytelling is incredibly powerful – get it right, and not only will you create trust and empathy amongst your target audience, but you are also creating that memory retention too. Research by Dr. Jennifer Aaker of the Stanford Graduate School of Business found “a story is up to 22 times more memorable than facts alone” (source: John Millen).
We’re big advocates of storytelling. Take our work with The Salvation Army as an example. From 2009 to 2016, we worked with the charity to raise the profile of more than 220 charity shops across the UK. How did we do it? We proactively drove a news agenda of local stories and reacted to media enquiries for individual shops resulting in regular media coverage and a 20% increase in shop donations during the campaign period.
How can Absolute help your non-profit organisation?
We hope you have found our top tips useful on how non-profits can maximise awareness this giving season. Of course, our knowledge doesn’t stop there! The team at Absolute PR and Marketing has decades of experience in helping non-profits tell their story and get the recognition they deserve.
If you think you could benefit from our expertise and advice, please contact us by calling 01392 680740 or email info@absoluteprandmarketing.com.
You can find out more about our work with non-profit organisations by reading our case studies: