From content strategy to comprehensive copywriting support and bespoke marketing training, we help you stand out in a sea of equally worthy causes – so you strengthen relationships with policymakers, donors, local communities, and other stakeholders.
Trust is key in any sector, but especially in a crowded environment with multiple competing interests, where your every move risks being under the public microscope.
We help you spotlight your impact in ways that keep stakeholders engaged and on side, and brings more funding through your doors.
Showcase how you're making a tangible difference and strengthen your reputation for transparency and accountability.
Actions speak louder than words. We help you prove to stakeholders and the public that you're walking the talk on sustainability.
Keep donors, members, and local communities in the loop and invested in your mission's success.
Get bespoke, hands-on marketing and copywriting training your in-house staff can put in practice straight away.
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The brief was to raise the profile of homeshare across a wide range of media, and Gunning Marketing took on the challenge in a thoroughly professional, creative and effective way. The press release they prepared, and the infographic produced to support the key messages, have had a measurable impact on the awareness of homeshare as a concept - relieving loneliness and social isolation for older people and those living with disabilities - as well as of the umbrella organisation, Homeshare International, itself. We are happy to recommend Gunning Marketing without reservation.
Gunning Marketing is exceptionally easy to work with. Their approach is efficient, intelligent and highly organised. They approach everything with pragmatism and creativity and a strong sense of the most valuable approach to the project on hand. A joy to work with on detailed and complex projects.
Anna and Gunning Marketing provided the Energy Systems Catapult with a comprehensive copywriting service, collaborating with our different business units and partners to produce a range of case studies to highlight the impact of our work. The service we received was tailored to our needs and delivered over and above our expectations. I would highly recommend them to anyone looking for an exceptional copywriting and content generation partner, no matter the subject matter!
Corporate donors and funders aren’t evaluating whether your organisation does meaningful work – they’re generally satisfied it does. They’re evaluating whether you can demonstrate, clearly and credibly, what that work actually changes. The distinction that matters is outputs versus outcomes: not the number of people served or sessions delivered, but what changed in someone's life, situation, or capabilities because of this work. Making that distinction clearly is one of the most direct ways to strengthen a funding case.
Specific stories carry weight alongside aggregated statistics. Stories cut through, meaning the reader can engage with a described individual – the specific situation they were in, what the intervention involved, what's measurably different in their life now – in a way a statistic alone doesn’t allow. The individual story makes the statistic real.
Structure is the most common failure point. For example, reports organised around the organisation's internal structure – department by department, programme by programme – can be less engaging than reports organised around the story the reader needs to follow. A reader-centred structure might follow the journey of a beneficiary, the arc of a year's work against strategic goals, or progress on a specific challenge. These can be more compelling than an org chart rendered as chapters.
Data should tell a story, not document activity. "3,247 people supported this year" doesn’t give the reader what they need to evaluate significance. "3,247 people supported this year – 34% more than the previous year, against a backdrop of increasing demand" does. Every significant statistic should be accompanied by enough context to make it meaningful.
Social value communications fail in a predictable way: they list activities and commitments at a level of generality that signals compliance rather than genuine commitment. "We're committed to creating positive social value for the communities we serve" says nothing that every competitor won't also claim. The route out is specificity: what precisely has your organisation done, in a specific community, with a specific and measurable outcome?
The challenge usually isn't a shortage of genuine social value to report, but the discipline to select the most compelling evidence, present it clearly, and connect it to the specific outcomes the funder or framework is looking for.
Various frameworks exist to help organisations measure and evidence social value – from the Social Value Act and TOMs (relevant where you're bidding for public sector contracts) to NCVO's outcomes frameworks and individual funders' own impact measurement requirements. Used properly, any of these generates the kind of specific, evidenced data that makes social value reporting meaningful rather than performative: employment of local labour, apprenticeship numbers, supply chain spend within a defined radius, community hours contributed. Those figures transform abstract commitments into specific, auditable contributions – and they belong in your marketing content, not just your compliance reports.
The answer isn't to spread limited resource proportionally across all channels and audiences. It’s to identify the one or two communications priorities that will have the greatest impact on the organisation's ability to deliver its mission – and concentrate resource there. For most third sector organisations, that means either communications directly supporting income generation (major donor cultivation, grant applications, commissioning relationships) or communications building the awareness and credibility that grow the supporter base over time.
Owned channels – email, website, social – are disproportionately valuable for organisations with limited paid media budget, because they allow direct and repeated contact with a warm audience at low cost. A well-maintained email list of engaged supporters is one of the most valuable assets a charity can hold, and the investment required to build and nurture it's largely in content quality rather than media spend.
Where professional copywriting investment is constrained, training in-house teams to write more effectively is often the highest-return option available. A communications team that understands how to lead with the reader's interest, structure an appeal for maximum effect, and make data tell a story delivers value across every piece of content they produce. Gunning Marketing delivers bespoke copywriting training to in-house teams, giving communications professionals practical tools they can use immediately and consistently.
Grant applications that get funded aren't always the strongest programmes – they're the applications that most clearly demonstrate programme quality, organisational credibility, and alignment with the funder's priorities, in language the funder can use to justify their decision. Read the funder's own language carefully and use it to frame your response. Then follow a structure that answers the four questions every funder is asking:
Evidence should be proportionate and specific. A list of statistics about the scale of the problem is less valuable than a specific, evidenced account of how you know your intervention works – your own data, independent evaluation, or credible external evidence. Funders have become increasingly sophisticated in evaluating evidence quality; the organisations that succeed tend to be those that can point to what genuinely demonstrates impact in their area, rather than defaulting to the most readily available numbers.
Clarity, precision, and a document that respects the reader's time also signal something important: that this is an organised, professional team. An application that's difficult to navigate or padded beyond what the argument requires costs the reader effort.
Donor appeal copy that converts focuses on one person, not many. "Your donation will help thousands of people" can be too abstract to move anyone. "Your donation will help someone like Maria – a 67-year-old living alone after her husband's death, who came to us unable to leave the house. 6 weeks later, she was running a weekly lunch group" gives the donor someone to give to. Specificity and stories create an emotional connection that drives action.
A structure that works for donor appeals:
One common pitfall is copy that focuses on the organisation's work rather than the donor's role in it. Donors aren’t giving to an organisation – they're giving through an organisation to a person or outcome they care about. Copy that consistently positions the donor as the agent of change ("your support means Maria can...") converts better than copy that positions the organisation as the hero ("thanks to our work...").
