--- title: "Awareness Asymmetry: What Not-for-Profit Brand Data Hides" description: Donors, service users, referrers and funders are separate markets. One aggregate awareness figure averages them into a number that describes none. image: https://info.brandhealth.com.au/hubfs/NFPAwareness.png --- **[![logo](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/hubfs/Imported%20images/Layer_1%20(1).png%3Fwidth=390%26height=50%26name=Layer_1%20(1).png)](https://brandhealth.com.au/)** - [Solutions](https://brandhealth.com.au/brand-research-solutions/) - [Pricing](https://brandhealth.com.au/brand-research-pricing/) - [Resources](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/) - [Contact](https://brandhealth.com.au/contact-brand-research-experts/) - [Login](https://app.brandhealth.com.au/user/login/) ![arrow-right](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/hubfs/raw_assets/public/Brand_Health_April2024%20Theme/images/arrow-curve-right.svg) [Book A Free Consultation](https://brandhealth.com.au/free-consultation/) # Awareness Asymmetry: What Not-for-Profit Brand Data Hides ** 10 min Share - [**](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/not-for-profit-brand-awareness-asymmetry) - [**](https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/not-for-profit-brand-awareness-asymmetry) *A single awareness figure can look healthy and still describe none of the audiences a purpose-led organisation depends on.* ## Key takeaways 1. **Purpose-led organisations serve several distinct audiences, and the brand performs differently in each.** Donors, service users, volunteers, referrers and funders form separate markets, and strength in one says almost nothing about the others. 2. **A single aggregate awareness figure conceals which audience is failing.** A strong donor result and a weak service-user result average into a healthy-looking number that describes neither group. 3. **The audience that matters most commercially is usually not the one being measured.** For most service organisations, being known by the person at the point of need, or by whoever refers them, governs the outcome more directly than general public awareness does. 4. **Measuring several audiences costs less than most boards assume.** The expense sits in reaching hard-to-find groups, not in the number of groups, and a well-designed single wave can carry three or four. Australia has 62,867 registered charities. The sector employs around 1.6 million people, roughly 11 per cent of the workforce, and engages 3.9 million volunteers. Almost every one of those organisations is competing for the same finite pool of attention, donation and volunteer time, and most of them measure their standing in it, if they measure it at all, with a single number. That number is usually prompted awareness among the general Australian public. It is the metric boards ask for, the metric funders recognise, and the metric that moves most visibly after a campaign. It is also, for most purpose-led organisations, close to the least informative thing they could measure. The reason is structural rather than methodological. A commercial brand largely serves one market. A purpose-led organisation serves several, and its brand can be strong in one and invisible in another without the aggregate figure ever showing it. *Awareness Asymmetry is the gap between how well an organisation is known by one audience it depends on and how well it is known by another. It arises wherever outcomes rest on several distinct groups rather than one, and it is concealed by any aggregate awareness figure, because a strong result in one audience offsets a weak result in another. The aggregate can rise while the audience that governs the mission gets harder to reach.* ## The audiences a purpose-led organisation actually depends on Most sit on four or five, and they overlap far less than the internal narrative suggests. **Donors and supporters** give money. They respond to cause salience, trust and visibility, and they are the audience most organisations already measure, because fundraising teams have historically owned research budgets. **Service users and beneficiaries** seek help. They need to think of the organisation at a specific and often difficult moment, which is a very different mental task from recognising a logo in a survey. **Referrers** send people. General practitioners, social workers, school counsellors, community leaders. For many health and community organisations this is the single most commercially consequential audience and the one least often researched. **Volunteers** give time, and with 2.5 volunteers for every employee across the sector, and 53 per cent of charities operating with no paid staff at all, this is an operational input rather than a nice-to-have. **Funders**, whether government, philanthropic or corporate, make decisions on reputation, evidence and perceived competence rather than on public profile. A brand can be strong with donors and weak with referrers. It can be well known to funders and invisible to the people it exists to serve. Those are not variations in degree, they are different market positions, and averaging them produces a figure that describes an audience that does not exist. ## Why does one awareness number conceal so much? Because averaging is the specific thing that destroys the information. Suppose an organisation measures 45 per cent prompted awareness nationally. That single figure could sit on top of 70 per cent among donors and 20 per cent among the people who need the service. It could equally sit on top of 40 and 50, an organisation performing evenly. The two situations demand completely different responses and are indistinguishable in the reported number. Now suppose the figure moves to 50 per cent after a campaign. That looks like success. It is also exactly what a donor-focused campaign produces, and it is entirely compatible with service-user awareness having fallen. The organisation books a win, allocates more budget to what appeared to work, and the gap widens. This is the same failure the whole discipline keeps running into in different clothes: [the level looks fine while the thing that governs the outcome moves the other way](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/brand-health-metrics). It is more acute in the not-for-profit sector for two reasons. The audiences are more genuinely separate than in most commercial categories. And the metric is more likely to be a reporting obligation to a funder, which creates pressure to move the number rather than to understand it. ## Where the asymmetry usually sits Four patterns show up repeatedly. **Strong with donors, weak at the point of need.** The most common. Fundraising communications reach a broad, engaged, older audience. The person in crisis at two in the morning is a different person entirely, and unprompted recall in that moment is what determines whether they reach out. Prompted awareness in a survey does not measure this. Unprompted recall against a described situation does. **Strong nationally, weak regionally, or the reverse.** Organisations with a metropolitan base often assume their profile extends outward and find it does not. This is why a national figure with no geographic cut is close to useless for any organisation with a regional mandate, and why the regional read has to be designed for at the briefing stage rather than requested afterwards. **Known by the public, unknown by referrers.** Referrer audiences are small, professional and hard to reach, which is precisely why they go unmeasured. They are also the group whose behaviour translates most directly into service volume. **Recognised but not understood.** An organisation can be widely known while what it actually does is misunderstood, or believed to be narrower than it is. High awareness with low accuracy on services offered is a common and expensive pattern, and it looks identical to a strong result in any tracker that only measures recognition. ## How to measure several audiences without several budgets The instinct is that four audiences means four studies. It usually does not. What drives the cost of research is the difficulty of reaching people, not the number of groups you are interested in. General public, donors and volunteers can often be sampled within a single well-designed wave, because they are reachable through the same channels and can be identified by screening questions rather than by separate fieldwork. The [published ranges for a standard Australian tracker](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/brand-tracking-cost-australia) hold for that shape. Where the cost genuinely rises is with professional and low-incidence audiences. Finding 150 general practitioners who refer into your category is a specialist exercise, and it is priced accordingly, for the same reasons that [any hard-to-reach professional audience costs more](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/how-to-actually-reach-the-b2b-audiences-everyone-says-are-impossible). That is a real constraint and it is worth being deliberate about: a referrer study run once every three years will teach an organisation more than a general public tracker run annually. Three design decisions make the difference. **Decide the audiences before the questionnaire.** Each group you intend to report on separately needs a defensible base. Adding the cut afterwards is not possible, and this is the mistake that most often makes a study undecidable. **Ask for unprompted recall against a situation, not just against a category.** "Which organisations come to mind if you or someone close to you needed help with X" measures something entirely different from "which of these organisations have you heard of", and it is much closer to what actually determines whether someone reaches out. **Benchmark against the organisations you actually compete with for attention.** Purpose-led organisations are often reluctant to name a competitive set, on the reasonable grounds that they are not competing for profit. They are nonetheless competing for donation, volunteer hours and referral, and a brand figure with no comparison set cannot be interpreted. This is the same discipline that makes sector-specific tracking work in [other mission-driven categories such as higher education](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/how-brand-tracking-can-predict-university-enrolment-risk). ## What changes if you measure it this way The immediate change is that the board conversation stops being about whether awareness went up. An aggregate figure invites one question and one answer: is the number higher than last year, and if not, do we need more marketing. A disaggregated figure invites better questions. Which audience is the constraint. Is the problem that people do not know us, or that they know us and do not understand what we do. Is the gap in the general public or in the fifty referrers who send us most of our clients. Those questions have different answers and different price tags, and most of them are cheaper to act on than a general awareness campaign. The practical starting point does not require new research. Take whatever awareness data you already hold and ask which audience it actually describes. For most organisations the honest answer is donors, or the general public as a proxy for donors, because that is who the research was originally commissioned to understand. If the outcome you are accountable for depends on service users or referrers, then the number on your dashboard is measuring a different organisation from the one you are trying to run. ## Frequently asked questions **We are a small charity with no research budget. What is the minimum useful thing to do?** Ask your existing service users how they first heard of you, and record the answers systematically for six months. It is not representative and it will not tell you about the people who never arrived, which is the real question. But it costs nothing, it usually surprises people, and it will tell you whether your referral pathway is what you assume it is. That finding alone is often enough to redirect effort, and it makes the case for a properly designed study later. **Should we measure awareness among people we cannot serve?** Often yes, and it is counter-intuitive. If your service is geographically or eligibility limited, awareness among ineligible people is not wasted, because those people refer, donate and volunteer. What matters is not measuring them as though they were the target audience. Measure them separately and hold them to different expectations. **Our funders require an awareness target. How do we handle that?** Report it, and report alongside it the audience-level breakdown and what each one governs. Funders generally accept a more sophisticated measure when it is presented as additional rather than as a replacement, particularly when it shows a result the aggregate concealed. The reporting obligation is rarely the obstacle people expect. The obstacle is having the disaggregated data available in the first place, which is a design decision made long before the report is written. --- If your organisation depends on several audiences and reports on one number, the gap between them is measurable and it is usually larger than expected. Brand Health designs research programs for purpose-led organisations that report by audience rather than in aggregate, so the figure on your dashboard describes the group whose behaviour actually determines your outcomes. [Schedule a free 30-minute consultation to talk through which audiences your current measurement is missing.](https://brandhealth.com.au/free-consultation/) --- **Tom Morris** is Managing Director of Brand Health, an Australian brand research consultancy specialising in custom brand tracking. [Connect on LinkedIn.](https://www.linkedin.com/company/19272912) Share - [**](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/not-for-profit-brand-awareness-asymmetry) - [**](https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/not-for-profit-brand-awareness-asymmetry) # Let us be your guide Discover how Brand Health can help you unlock insights to drive your brand's growth! [Get Started](https://brandhealth.com.au/free-consultation) ## Related posts #### [When Everyone Knows You and Nobody Buys: Fiat's Australian Retreat](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/when-everyone-knows-you-and-nobody-buys-fiats-australian-retreat) In June, Ferrari sold 16 new cars in Australia. Lamborghini sold 18. 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