It’s a question that Stephen Thorn, Consultant for the Centre for Charity Effectiveness (CCE) at Bayes Business School, explores in great depth in his upcoming book.

In this complete guide to charity marketing, he examines how charity and commercial marketing differ, outlines how to develop an effective marketing strategy, and introduces several practical frameworks to support your planning.

In this blog, Stephen offers a preview of what to expect from the book, sharing some key ideas on how charities can better understand and strengthen the marketing they are already doing.

Do you do marketing?

Ask a room full of charity leaders whether their organisation ‘does marketing’ and many will hesitate.

Some will say no. Others will point to a colleague managing social media, or perhaps an occasional campaign. A few may describe a more structured function and mention a plan. But across the sector, marketing is still widely perceived as a specialist activity - something distinct from the real, everyday work of programmes, income generation, or service delivery.

Hint, you probably do

Almost every charity is already doing marketing – often without realising it.

Not in the narrow sense of advertising or promotion, but in the broader, more meaningful sense of engaging people: understanding their needs, communicating value, and encouraging action.

Whether it is a CEO making the case for support to a funder, a frontline worker building trust with service users, or a trustee advocating for the organisation in their network - these are all acts of marketing.

The issue, then, is not whether charities are doing marketing. It is whether they are doing it intentionally.

Marketing in a charity context

At its core, marketing is best understood not as a set of tools, but as a management process. The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines it as identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements. In a charity context, we might substitute the word ‘customer’ for ‘stakeholder’ - a group that includes beneficiaries, donors, volunteers, partners, and others with a stake in the organisation’s work.

Seen in this light, marketing becomes less about outputs (campaigns, content, channels) and more about disciplines: understanding who matters to your organisation, what they need or value, how you engage them, and how you learn from that engagement over time.

marketing becomes less about outputs…
and more about disciplines

Most charities are already doing parts of this, albeit informally. They are:

• Holding data on supporters in a CRM system
• Running surveys or gather feedback from service users
• Segmenting audiences for fundraising appeals
• Developing messages to communicate their impact
• Building relationships with partners and collaborators.

All this activity sits firmly within the domain of marketing, even if it is not labelled as such.

The challenge arises when these activities are fragmented, reactive, or disconnected from strategy.

Building your framework

Without a coherent approach, organisations can find themselves doing marketing in a vacuum – trying to deliver results without a clear framework, shared understanding, or adequate resources. In other cases, marketing activity becomes siloed within a single function, disconnected from fundraising, programmes, or organisational planning. The result is often duplication, inconsistency, and missed opportunities for impact.

A more effective approach is to recognise marketing as something that cuts across the whole organisation.

This does not necessarily mean creating a large marketing department or investing heavily in new roles.

Many organisations can make significant progress by embedding a few core principles:

• Clarity about who their stakeholders are
• A structured approach to understanding needs and behaviours
• Consistent messaging grounded in purpose (and ideally based on a Case for Support)
• A commitment to measuring and learning from engagement.

In practice

This might involve aligning fundraising and communications around shared audience insights, ensuring that programme teams contribute to (and benefit from) stakeholder feedback, or integrating marketing thinking into business planning and governance discussions.

Importantly, this approach also helps to address a common concern within the sector - that marketing is somehow peripheral to, or even at odds with, the charitable mission.

When done well, the opposite is true. Marketing provides the tools and frameworks to better understand the people a charity exists to serve and support, and to design more effective ways of engaging them. It enables organisations not only to raise income, but to build relationships, mobilise communities, and ultimately increase their impact.

marketing… enables organisations not only to raise income, but to build relationships, mobilise communities, and ultimately increase their impact

Marketing with purpose

So, the question for charity leaders is not whether to ‘do marketing’.  Instead, it is whether to recognise the marketing you are already doing - and to do it more deliberately, more coherently, and more effectively.

As the sector continues to navigate increasing demand, constrained resources, and growing complexity, that shift from implicit to intentional marketing may prove to be one of the most important steps an organisation can take.

Transform the way you work

Stephen makes up part of our expert consultancy team here at Bayes CCE. We offer bespoke, tailored consultancy services for nonprofit organisations, offering you the opportunity to work in partnership with leading experts to help you review and transform the way you work.

Stephen’s complete guide to charity marketing book will be coming soon. Publication date is still to be confirmed. In the meantime, you can find out more about our specialist consultancy services at Centre for Charity Effectiveness and the MSc Charity Marketing and Fundraising.