Many Charities Don’t Measure Results of Marketing Efforts, Study Finds

Most charities spend less than $100,000 a year on marketing, according to a study released today by the American Marketing Association and Lipman Hearne, a marketing company that serves nonprofit groups. But very few groups know whether their marketing efforts are making a difference, the study found.

The biggest goal of those efforts is to make the public more aware of their organizations, while the second most important goal is to raise money, the study found.

Charities said they thought that the best ways to build awareness of their organizations were through articles and broadcasts about them in the news media and through efforts to win attention from government officials and other leaders who could influence public opinion.

However, many organizations also confessed that they don’t know for sure how effective their marketing is. About a quarter of organizations surveyed said they don’t try to measure the effectiveness of many types of marketing techniques.

Marketing budgets also varied depending on the type of organization. Colleges and universities spend the most on marketing: Only 20 percent of them have marketing budgets of less than $100,000, for example, and 18 percent have budgets higher than a million dollars. Human-services groups spent the least: 62 percent had marketing budgets of less than $100,000, while only 6 percent spent $1-million or more.

The survey of 1,012 nonprofit marketing officials was conducted online in May.