Over the past several years I’ve worked with 258 EA organisations through User-Friendly, most often on branding, websites, and campaigns. Working across this many organisations has given me a fairly wide view of how marketing is currently understood and used within the EA ecosystem. The contexts vary, but the underlying patterns are surprisingly consistent, regardless of cause area, size, or geography.
This post is a reflection on those recurring patterns. It is not intended as criticism, and it is not written from an outsider perspective. It comes from years of being embedded in projects, seeing what organisations request, where projects get stuck, and what tends to make the biggest difference when it is addressed early.
My aim is simply to share practical observations that might help EA organisations use marketing more deliberately, earlier in the process, and in ways that better support their strategic objectives rather than just their communications outputs.
A simple checklist I wish more organisations completed before scaling
If I could encourage every EA organisation to do ten things early, it would be these:
- Build a market segmentation grounded in real audience data
- Define a clear positioning statement (one sentence, not paragraphs)
- Map a full marketing funnel (awareness → consideration → action)
- Set objectives at each funnel stage (SMART objectives)
- Allocate a defined marketing budget linked to those objectives (zero-based budgeting)
- Evaluate all channels strategically (not just defaulting to Meta ads!)
- Develop a distinctive brand with recognisable distinctive assets
- Build a website for your target audience, not internal stakeholders
- Invest in long-term awareness alongside short-term campaigns
- Involve trained marketing expertise early, not just at the execution stage
Why I’m sharing this
This is not just a critique of the EA space. In many ways, it reflects a broader nonprofit pattern. But EA organisations are unusually analytical and impact-focused. That makes them especially well-placed to benefit from structured, evidence-based marketing.
From my experience at User-Friendly, the organisations that treat marketing as a strategic function rather than a communications add-on consistently achieve stronger outcomes over time.
If this post resonates, I’m always happy to share frameworks, examples, or practical guidance tailored to EA organisations and cause-focused campaigns. Talk to me at letstalk@userfriendly.org.uk
1. EA organisations are not exempt from basic (human) marketing realities
There is often an implicit belief that because a cause is important, the rules of attention, behaviour, and persuasion operate differently.
They do not.
People still:
- Filter information emotionally
- Respond to clarity over complexity
- Notice distinctive brands more than generic ones
- Act when friction is low and relevance is high
Good intentions or good ideas do not compensate for unclear positioning or weak communication. If anything, high-stakes causes require stronger marketing, not less!
2. Marketing is usually brought in far too late
In most of the projects I work on, marketing only enters the process at the very end.
By that point, the core strategy has already been decided, programmes have been fully designed, and the messaging is often only loosely defined. Only then, once most major decisions are locked in and budgets are largely allocated, is a brand or website commissioned with whatever time and funding remain. This makes marketing act as a layer of presentation rather than a tool for shaping the direction and effectiveness of the work from the start.
This reverses how effective organisations operate.
Marketing should shape:
- Who you are trying to reach
- How you frame the problem
- What behaviour change you want
- How success will be measured
When marketing is treated as a finishing layer, the output might look good but will likely underperform.
3. Branding and websites are visible, but strategy is the leverage
Many organisations hire us for branding or a website. That is understandable because these are tangible deliverables.
However, the highest leverage work is usually strategy, including:
- Market segmentation
- Positioning
- Funnel design
- Behavioural objectives
- Message hierarchy
Without this, even a well-designed website becomes a brochure rather than a conversion tool. For example: there’s also only a limited amount of improvement I can make once the (often poor) name and branding has been set.
4. There is a heavy over-focus on digital ads
Digital ads are attractive because they are measurable and immediate. This makes them feel like “real marketing”.
But in practice, ads are only one small component of growth.
Most EA organisations:
- Underinvest in brand awareness
- Overinvest in short-term activation
- Expect direct response outcomes without prior familiarity
- Don’t think too much about the actual ad creative
Decades of marketing science consistently show that long-term awareness building and short-term activation should work together. Not in isolation.
In the EA space, long-term awareness work is still extremely rare, and the only growth I’ve seen is a focus on digital ad optimisation, but without branding effectively or really considering the ad creative. More previous thoughts on this here.
5. Marketing is often siloed into narrow roles
It is still uncommon for EA organisations to hire a trained marketer with broad strategic responsibility.
Instead, roles are often fragmented into:
- Social media
- Content
- Digital ads
- Comms
Each of these is useful, but they are slices of marketing, not marketing itself. And there is often a lack of specific marketing training in hired individuals, rather just passionate advocates that have self-led specialisms.
This leads to activity without cohesion.
6. AI tools are starting to replace strategic thinking (prematurely)
AI tools like ChatGPT are increasingly used to generate:
- Campaign ideas
- Messaging
- Strategies
- Brand names and logos
This feels efficient, but it’s risky if used as a substitute for strategic reasoning.
AI outputs tend to be extremely generic and based on pattern matching, not deep audience insight or organisational context. Whenever I’ve worked with these tools, even meaningfully for a long period of time, I’d never stand by the output. Marketing plans, brands, strategies - anything in this arena that it spits out is largely going to be unclear, misguided or maybe even damaging.
Your work deserves higher quality thinking than an AI tool can give you!
7. Naming and positioning are consistently undervalued
Many organisations invest years into programmes but only hours into naming and positioning. I wrote a fairly well received and often mentioned post about naming 4 years ago, but sadly, it seems like we’re still pretty poor at naming things.
We continually create brands that are:
- Abstract
- Internally meaningful
- Externally unclear
A strong name and positioning statement reduce ongoing marketing costs because they make communication easier and more memorable.
8. “Pretty” design is often prioritised over effective communication
I frequently see organisations use:
- Free design tools
- Volunteer or cheap designers (Fivver etc)
- Generic templates
This can produce visually pleasant outputs, but not necessarily effective ones.
Effective design is not about aesthetics alone. It is about branding assets, clarity, hierarchy, and behaviour change.
9. Marketing budgets are rarely tied to objectives
Another recurring issue is the absence of a defined marketing budget linked to specific goals.
Instead, budgets are often:
- Opportunistic
- Leftover
- Channel-led rather than objective-led
This makes it difficult to plan sustainable growth or evaluate impact properly. My recommendation for budgeting is first, get your funnel worked out, figure out how much conversions cost and produce a budget from a ‘zero-based budgeting’ process. This is the most strategic and logical way to build a budget.
Super basic example:
From testing, we know we can get a fellowship sign up for ~$5.
We know we need 10 applications for every single strong application.
This year we want 300 fellows.
Therefore we should have a budget of $15,000 for our fellowship. (3,000 applications x $5)
What tends to happen is you have a target of 300 applicants, and someone decided the budget was $1,000 and that’s considered done.
10. Long-term awareness building is the biggest missed opportunity
Perhaps the most striking pattern: very few EA organisations run sustained, long-term marketing to grow awareness. I wrote about this 3 years ago here.
Most efforts are:
- Campaign bursts
- Launch moments
- Petition pushes
- Fundraising drives
These matter. But without ongoing awareness growth, each campaign has to start from near zero attention.
From a marketing science perspective, this is very inefficient, and it’s not being solved by the rise in focus on short-term digital marketing campaigns as the sole marketing output.
We’re here to help
As ever, we are on-hand to support organisations as best as we can so if you need support with any of the above, please feel free to reach out at letstalk@userfriendly.org.uk