The efficiency trap

How the non-profit sector can fight the sea of sameness by breaking its dependence on performance

Charities spend roughly six times more on direct response media than on brand, which probably isn’t surprising to anyone reading this. Donate now! asks, year-end pushes and direct response appeals have always been at the core of mass fundraising. However, recent research shows that direct response campaigns in isolation have almost no measurable effect beyond 6-12 months after their time in market.

We're pouring most of our budget into the short term, and it’s coming at a cost.

Here's the part nobody wants to admit: we're not doing it because it works better. We're doing it because it’s easier to measure, and it’s what we’ve always done. Results can be pulled straight from a database, and there’s a straightforward ROI to communicate to senior leadership and the board to justify investment.

On the other hand, the dividends that brand pay are harder to measure and require patience. And when an organization has never invested significantly in brand marketing before, it can be challenging to justify the resources, and it often requires a cultural shift in how marketing is approached.

So, we optimize the thing we can easily track – short-term performance – and starve the thing we can't – brand – and then wonder why growth gets more expensive every single year.

But there's another cost, and it's one we don’t often consider. When every organization optimizes performance – with the same urgent ask and heartstring-tugging appeal copy – we all start to sound identical. Come December, donors’ inboxes, mailboxes and feeds are a wall of indistinguishable need. Performance marketing is a sameness machine, especially when it doesn’t connect to a compelling brand.

And for a sector competing over a shrinking pool of donors, according to CRA data, sameness is an existential problem, not only a brand one. Donors don’t choose the most optimized appeal. They choose an organization with momentum they want to be a part of; the one that’s top-of-mind when it comes to accomplishing the impact they want to see in the world. That’s not something that can be established in a year-end appeal.

So, we need to accept an uncomfortable truth: the most efficient way to starve long-term growth is to pour so many resources into the short term.

Here’s what non-profits can do instead.

We reward harvesting, not planting

Let’s turn to a nature metaphor for a moment.

Performance marketing on its own doesn’t plant a forest. It harvests it, and if we’re not careful, it can clear-cut it. It does not create demand; it converts demand that already exists. This is the single most misunderstood thing in the sector, and too often, people get it wrong when making marketing budget decisions.

When you optimize conversion only, you get better and better at logging trees. You do not get better at planting them. For a while this feels great, because the forest is full and the logging is cheap. Then the forest thins out, cost per acquisition creeps up, and we respond the only way a harvest-optimized system knows how. We push harder, with more asks, urgency and frequency. The numbers hold for a while, but the forest empties a little faster.

It’s hard to catch, because the cost and the savings show up in different quarters; sometimes in different fiscal years, or on different dashboards. We do a great job at creating efficiency. But there’s a cost to pay later on down the line.

We are not suggesting that performance marketing itself is the challenge, because performance marketing is necessary, and excellent at what it does. The challenge is a system that makes planting look like a cost and harvesting look like the sole revenue generator, when the truth is that a healthy forest harvests and replenishes at the same time.

We need to consider the forest, not just the trees.

Brand versus performance: a false fight

Non-profits are often structured to set up brand and performance in adversarial ways. Traditionally, direct response has sat with fundraising as a revenue-generating stream, and brand has sat with marketing and communications – a cost centre. That doesn’t set the stage for establishing how both work together seamlessly as an ecosystem.

Here’s the reality: brand creates the demand, while performance captures it. And what we often don’t realize is that capturing it well feeds the brand back. Every credible, on-message, brand-amplifying conversion is itself an impression, a small deposit into trust and salience. They are not a sequence where one hands off to the other. They are a loop, each one making the other stronger.

Which means the question about whether to invest in brand or performance is the wrong one to be asking. The right question is whether the two are connected – whether they share the same goals and definition of what winning looks like – or whether they are two departments engaged in a battle for resources when they should be building momentum together.

The 60/40 split: how the forest grows

Renowned marketing researchers Les Binet and Peter Field analyzed close to a thousand campaigns and found the most effective split, across industries, sits around 60 per cent brand-building to 40 per cent activation. It’s since been validated in research specific to non-profits. That number isn’t set in stone, however: early-stage organizations or brand investments need to skew much harder to establish a presence in market, and the exact ratio can bend based on the need and the moment.

The point is the truth beneath the number: brand investment is the single biggest multiplier of future performance efficiency. Going back to our forest metaphor, brand is the root system. It's not a parallel nice-to-have you fund once the "real" work is paid for; it's the thing that decides what every harvest after will cost you.

So, you can spend 90 per cent of your budget on the year-end ask because the board wants to see the year-end number. The forest will let you. It just won't grow back as fast, and it makes the picking more expensive. You can't harvest your way to a healthy forest. You have to grow one.

The opportunity is hiding in plain sight

Here's the part that gets us excited.

We’re in a technical recession. Which means donors are tightening their wallets and asking harder questions about impact. Boards want even more efficiency. And so, your competitors in the sector are all going to have the same temptation: cutting brand, optimizing the harvest, and sounding more like one another while they do it.

But when everyone is clear-cutting – when the sector retreats to short-term performance – the ground is wide open for anyone with the nerve to plant. Research by Binet and Fields has also shown that investments in brand during economic downturns pays extra dividends for those with the courage to do so.

Non-profits that figure this out first don’t just win this year's gift: they build the meaning and distinctiveness that decides whose email gets opened and whose ends up in the trash for the next decade. Forests don't grow in a quarter, which is exactly why the ones that take root outlast everything around them.

In a sector being clear-cut into sameness by its focus on the short term, the most radical, efficient and growth-minded thing you can do is plant roots for the long term.

Don’t give your donors a message that’s been optimized. Give them one that means something.

Sources:

• GOOD Agency, The Integration Effect. 2025.
• Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. 2013. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Authors:
Meredith Ferguson, Group Strategy Director, Zulu Alpha Kilo
Samantha Cooke, Vice President, Philanthropy, Daily Bread Food Bank