While advertising can be a powerful way to get your message across, it can also be a complete waste of money, says Derek Humphries.

I want to tell you something. And let's face it  I'm not the only one. Everyone wants to tell you something, sell you something, get you to donate to something. Thousands of messages every day try to persuade you to do something that you weren't particularly planning on doing. Advertising, direct marketing, PR, guerrilla advertising, passionate people with clipboards... It's no surprise we're all getting good at the literal and metaphorical side-step, screening out and ignoring unsolicited messages. More competition than ever before makes it ever more difficult for good causes to be noticed.

Of course, there are plenty of ways for you to try to cut through the message maelstrom. An entirely unexhaustive list would include innovation in product development, harnessing the passion of volunteers, linking up with a genuinely committed celebrity, and awareness advertising campaigns. It's this last one I want to focus on. I want to focus on it because although it can be a powerful way to get your message across, it can also be a sure-fire way to quickly waste many thousands of pounds (add as many noughts as you like).

I believe charities should erase the words 'awareness advertising' from their collective vocabulary. By 'awareness advertising' I mean a campaign designed solely to raise awareness of a particular cause or campaign. To achieve any kind of shift in public awareness via awareness advertising alone requires a massive spend (hundreds of thousands of pounds). Sadly such awareness is likely to be short-lived, and will require sustained spend over a period of years. It's hard to see how spending donors' money in this ways can be justified.

Of course long-term awareness can help in terms of legacy income. But above all legacy income relies on trust, and we are all trusting advertising less and less. Indeed, based on recent research, the most trusted form of advertising these days is personal recommendation from a friend. Instead of spending shedloads of money on advertising, why not get people engaged as volunteers and advocates for your brand?

Aha, but won't you need advertising to get people involved as volunteers, as donors, as advocates? Indeed you may. But I wouldn't class such response-generating advertising as mere 'awareness'. I'd say that all charity advertising should be responsive in some way, i.e. it must offer me the means to get involved. In particular, it should give me the opportunity to give money.

As the fundraising cycle tells us, all good fundraising begins with a need, and it seems to me verging on the immoral to raise people's awareness of a need and then not offer them the chance to give (to give money, time, prayer or whatever else you think will help). It's not too long ago that I saw a full-colour, full-page magazine ad for a well-known environmental cause: a stunning image, a concise headline, and the words 'Support [name of organisation]. The only problem was, I couldn't support them because they wouldn't let me. There was no phone number, no website, no address, nothing. As a member of the public I was left feeling frustrated. As a marketer I was left suspecting that the ad had been paid for from a general awareness budget.

Advertising can of course play an important role in public communications. And some causes do make good use of advertising that engages the public (as ever, the name NSPCC springs to mind!). But to do so, advertising needs to escape the confines of silo-structured thinking and silo-structured budgets. Call it integration if you must, but really it is no more than simple joined-up thinking.

All advertising should play a part in an overall communications campaign that is designed to help you meet your strategic and fundraising objectives. If you approach it in this way, you will offer people the chance to give, to volunteer, to request information and more through various channels that are co-ordinated strategically and creatively. And you will do so in a way that is planned sufficiently well for you to evaluate where you have spent the money and where you have made an impact. Did the ads drive traffic to your website? How much traffic? What did these people do when they got to your site? Did they give? Did they send info to friends? And so on.

Doing all of this isn't easy, and it will cost money. But it seems to me a far more sensible way to spend money than throwing it at advertising that creates a transient blip in awareness.

Derek Humphries is director and creative strategist at THINK Consulting Solutions