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Regional charity uses £60,000 grant to launch TV awareness campaign

Fundraising | Kirsty Weakley | 19 Sep 2012

A regional children’s charity has rebranded and launched a £60,000 advertising campaign to raise awareness of the work it does as it attempts to diversify its income.

Grant-funding enabled the East Anglia-based Ormiston Children and Families Trust to undertake the action which will try to engage the public for the first time. It revealed its new logo and website this week (17 September), and a television commercial (below) highlighting the charity’s work with children will be shown at primetime on ITV Anglia and adverts will be placed in the press and on billboards.

The charity has budgeted £60,000 to spend on the media activity which comes from a grant it received to raise awareness of the charity.

While the campaign is not a fundraising appeal, chief executive Geoff Prescott said: “It is part of our overall fundraising strategy, in that it has been carefully designed to raise awareness of the Ormiston brand so that when we begin fundraising in earnest, potential supporters will have heard of us and be more likely to contribute.”

He added: “Longer term, we are looking to raise the level of fundraising income received by the Ormiston Children and Families Trust to 50 per cent of our total funds. With a fundraising team now on board at Ormiston, we are busy producing a series of fundraising events and campaigns that will help us achieve this target.”

The charity’s 2010/11 (the latest available) accounts note that the charity received 79 per cent of its funding from statutory sources, and that: “This continues to pose significant risks to the organisation while funding cuts across the statutory sector come to fruition.”

Advertising agency Ware Anthony Rust was appointed in January 2012 to provide creative input and support the launch of the campaign.

View the television commercial below: