How Shelter increased awareness and donations following a successful rebrand with YouGov
May 5th, 2022, Emily Patel

How Shelter increased awareness and donations following a successful rebrand with YouGov

The challenge

A large-scale rebrand of the charity.

The solution

YouGov’s living data solutions were used to provide granular audience insight and tracking.

Business outcomes

Effective campaign seeing a rise in all key KPIs.

Business challenge

Shelter is a British charity which exists to end homelessness. In 2021, they decided to undergo a company-wide rebrand. To make sure they were taking the brand in the right direction, they needed reliable, accurate insights on their audience. They also needed to benchmark their total brand health before, during, and after the rebrand process.

They needed:
• To understand audience segmentation in detail
• Pre, mid and post campaign measurement
• Continuous measurement of brand metrics over time
• Ad hoc research to support Marketing, Policy and Media teams.

Solution & approach

Shelter utilized a range of YouGov’s living data products. Firstly, YouGov Profiles was used to gain granular insight into the attitudes and behaviors of each segment of their target audience, allowing them to know with certainty the best channels to reach them by with marketing communications.

Next, Shelter engaged YouGov CharityIndex – a tracker developed specifically for brands in the NGO and non-profit sector – to view their current and historic brand health, and establish a baseline against which to gauge the success of their rebrand. Following the launch, CharityIndex also allowed Shelter to continuously monitor the continual impact of their rebrand, using the tool’s 16 key metrics as clear KPIs to benchmark against.

Finally, Shelter used YouGov Surveys: Serviced to conduct ad hoc research, providing bespoke data for their strategic insight, policy, and media teams. This custom research was then connected directly to the syndicated data from YouGov Profiles, yielding the richest, most comprehensive dataset possible.

Business outcomes

YouGov’s living data helped Shelter to ensure the successful roll-out of their rebrand. YouGov Profiles enabled them to develop and refine their marketing strategy, and to effectively communicate the rebrand to all of their key target audiences. Via YouGov CharityIndex, Shelter saw short and long-term increases to key brand metrics such as unaided awareness and donation consideration – particularly among the Under 45s group and Shelter’s supporter segments.


The custom research data gained from YouGov Surveys: Serviced proved vital in supporting policy and media campaigns as part of the wider rebrand strategy, and in ensuring the rebrand was executed successfully.

Client testimonial

“Being able to use YouGov’s suite of products has as allowed us to use an insight led approach to not only the rebrand, but all the activity we do across Shelter. Providing targeted and granular audience insight to support Marketing, Policy and Media Teams has played a key part to the success of the rebrand.

The way that YouGov’s data connects together our ad hoc research, brand tracking with all the data Profiles holds has been a real benefit to working with YouGov.”
Emma Heath, Audience Insight Manager

Discover YouGov Profiles

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Discover YouGov Surveys: Serviced