Why Your Charity Needs Its Own T-Shirt
If you're old enough, cast your mind back 20-25 years and remember the image that charities used to portray. If you’re not old enough, take a picture of this. It is 1989: the temporary coolness of Band Aid has faded into history and fundraising has reverted to tin shaking on street corners. Charity shops are musty dens more closely resembling Steptoe’s warehouse than Aladdin’s Cave – this is before the likes of Pulp and Alexander McQueen made charity shops cool. Your average charity supporter is more Nora Batty than Scarlet Johansson; and charity branding is practically non-existent. It is a dystopian vision of how things looked for charities up until the late nineties. No one would have been seen dead wearing your t-shirt even had it been cost effective for you to have printed them.
Charities become cool
Fortunately things have come on a long way since then. Thanks to the growth of the internet, a younger generation is now more keenly engaged with issues of social justice than at any point since the sixties. Celebrity involvement and much needed image makeovers have made charities relevant, brand savvy and ‘hip’. In the case of some of the big players such as Oxfam and the NSPCC, this change has come courtesy of multi-million pound marketing budgets. The average charity is usually not as fortunate. They need maximum brand exposure without eating into precious funds better spent on good works. Charity t-shirts are the ideal way for small charities to achieve this.
Charity t-shirts and social media.
If you are a small to medium sized charity looking to increase your brand awareness, you can’t do better than printing your own custom charity t-shirts. This simple act has the potential to turn every one of your supporters into a walking advertisement for your cause and the good news is that t-shirts can now be affordably printed on small print-runs. All you need is an eye catching logo, slogan or design. Forget tabards and name badges; think of the marketing potential of every one of your supporters proudly wearing a t-shirt that boldly displays your cause. We live in a social media age. For every supporter who runs a marathon, drops from the sky or climbs a mountain on your behalf, dozens of photos will appear on Facebook, Flickr and Instagram. These in turn will be shared and retweeted to an audience of potentially thousands of sponsors, friends, family and acquaintances – many of whom might themselves be potential supporters hearing of your charity for the first time.So if there is one marketing item your charity spends money on this year, make it a run of t-shirts for your supporters. They are easy to design and produce; and will be an ‘appeal’ that keeps giving, time and time again.
Why not design your own t-shirt for your charity and tweet us a picture? We'll be happy to retweet to our followers and help drum up awareness for your charity! Just send your tweets to @inkthreadable