High-profile brand building exercises and glitzy advertising campaigns are generally associated with the private sector rather than charities and non-profit groups. Yet like companies, charities need to build trust with their donors and make a splash with their fundraising campaigns. However, in doing so they face not only budgetary and cultural challenges but also the difficulty of striking a balance between negative and positive images.

The first obstacle for non-profit groups when it comes to advertising and marketing is coming up with the money to fund the strategies. For cash-strapped organisations, ad campaigns and global communications initiatives are expenses that few can afford.

Moreover, donors often insist that the bulk of their funds should be directed towards projects on the ground, and resist the idea of their money being spent on the support side of their beneficiary’s operations. “People who give don’t want money to be spent on what you might loosely call ‘overheads’, and branding is an overhead,” says Wally Olins, a branding expert who is chairman of Saffron Brand Consultants.

In this respect, the internet is providing an alternative for the philanthropic sector – a low-cost tool that organisations can deploy to spread their messages. The results experienced by recipients of Google Grants – through which the search engine company gives free AdWords (pay-per-click advertisements) on Google to non-profits – demonstrate the power of online advertising for charities. CoachArt, which provides free art and athletics classes to children with life-threatening illnesses, has experienced a 60-70 per cent rise in the number of volunteers joining the scheme, while Unicef’s online shop increased its sales by 43 per cent.

As well as using donated advertising and beefing up their home pages, some organisations have been taking a creative approach to online

branding. Greenpeace, the environmental campaign group, now posts videos on YouTube

and has pages on the networking website MySpace and Facebook.

Such initiatives allow organisations to communicate with new audiences – particularly younger ones – that they might not have been

able to reach in the past. But while web-based communications do not necessarily involve paying high fees to advertising agencies, there are other costs involved.

“It costs staff time and it costs the very cherished and finite resource in the non-profit world, which is non-programmatic staff time,” says Chris Deri, head of corporate social responsibility and sustainability at Edelman, the global public relations firm, which counts non-profit groups among its clients. “Charities recognise the value of communications but most have a relatively thin communications budget and staff,” he adds. “And often the social networks and online media element of communications is added on to someone’s plate whereas it really needs to be its own beat.”

As well as having limited resources for communication strategies, the messages the charities need to convey have a wider remit than those of many private sector organisations. While companies focus on marketing their brands, services and products, charities must also spread the word about the causes they are supporting.

“Part of their mission is increasing awareness of the issues,” says Julia Kivistik, executive vice-president of the cause marketing group at Cone, the Boston-based brand strategy and communications agency.

Mr Deri says: “They have two responsibilities. The first is to achieve their own fundraising goals for their programmatic efforts but their communications also need to be cognisant of the overall movement to address, say, hunger and malnutrition. And that goes beyond the four walls of their activities and programmes.”

When it comes to embarking on advertising and marketing, charities also face a cultural obstacle. Because such disciplines are closely associated with the corporate world, many people in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors are reluctant to embrace them. “Because branding is associated with aspects of commerce that charities may find repellent, branding has difficulty in entering that world,” says Mr Olins.

Nevertheless, there is a growing recognition that branding and communications are powerful tools when it comes to furthering the missions of foundations, charities and non-profits – both in terms of raising funds and raising awareness. In an increasingly crowded non-profit marketplace, the need to stand out as a recognised and trusted recipient for donor money is becoming more important.

The sums spent are not insignificant. According to research from Changing Our World, a fundraising and philanthropy services organisation, large US non-profits spend at least $7.6bn a year on marketing and public relations. And because they work on issues about which people often feel passionate, non-profit groups are well suited to marketing strategies, according to Mr Olins. “Charities are ideal subjects for branding,” he says. “Because charities are all about emotion and people are turning to giving as a way of identifying themselves.”

He believes that as charities become more professional in the way they run all aspects of their operations, powerful brands will emerge. “They’ll use all of the marketing techniques available, including giving back to the donor an idea of what happens to their money,” he says.

Once organisations have embraced the idea of executing branding or marketing strategies, the next question is how to frame their message. And advertising is not the only tool in this respect. For many organisations, other communications strategies may prove more appropriate.

“If you want to communicate to gain general credibility and trust, advertising is a less compelling and effective way to do so than other channels of communication, such as real dialogue and information sharing,” says Mr Deri.

Moreover, once the decision to invest in brand building has been made, the financial resources have been found and the right communication channel has been selected, organisations must decide what image to portray.

For many organisations, the difficulty lies in striking the right balance between highlighting the problems they are trying to solve and conveying the more positive images of their success stories. Some believe that negative images can be counterproductive. In a Los Angeles Times editorial about Africa published earlier this year, New York University economist William Easterly lamented the “dark and scary picture of a helpless, backward continent that is being offered up to TV watchers and coffee drinkers”.

Mr Olins argues that negative marketing can deter donors rather than attracting them. “A lot of charities operate extremely tactically, and they do it by tugging at your heart strings,” he says. “But people get bored, upset and put off by this… so a lot of thought needs to go into the way in which the organisation presents itself.”

Many organisations are starting to use more upbeat imagery. On its website, the World Food Programme displays images of food aid being

delivered, not of starving people. The website for WaterAid, a UK-based organisation, shows a photograph of smiling children enjoying a stream of fresh water.

“That doesn’t mean sugar coating it – because there are real issues, so you have to state the facts,” says Ms Kivistik. “But then you need to show people what they could do, and convey the fact that they have an opportunity to make a difference.”