The National Trust has emerged as the most prominent charity brand in the UK based on its online visibility and prominence, a study has found.

The study looked at a raft of online performance indications including year-on-year visibility, social media followers, search volume trend and brand awareness.

With 450,000 monthly brand searches the National Trust has emerged with the highest score, followed by Dog Trust, with 301,000 monthly brand searches.

Overall, the National Trust has over 3.2 combined social media followers, across Instagram, Facebook and X.

The heritage charity also claimed top spot in the same study last year.

Another charity with strong monthly search figures is the RSPCA, which was looked for online 246,000 times each month. It has more than 1.1m social media followers.

Completing the top five are MacMillan Cancer Support and Mind, with around 60,000 monthly searchers each.

Other strong performers are RSPB, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, Cancer Research UK and BBC Children in Need.

The RSPB has more than 400,000 Instagram followers to put it in sixth place in terms of online prominence among charities.

Battersea has almost 1.4m followers across its social media channel to help it into seventh place.

“To boost awareness towards the particular cause, it’s important for charity brands to remain prominent in the digital space,” said Brett Janes, managing director of Salience Search Marketing, which has carried out the research.

"It’s been a rewarding twelve months for charities such as the National Trust, Dog Trust and RSPCA, with all three brands dominating search volume and prominence."

In terms of the biggest growth in traffic over the last year National Trust once again comes top in this list. The British Heart Foundation, Woodland Trust, Macmillan Cancer Support and Alzheimer’s Society complete the top five.

Meanwhile, Cancer Research UK has seen the biggest drop in online traffic, with RSPB, Age UK, Mind and Marie Curie completing the other spots in this more unwelcome top five.

Sleeping giants

Salience also looked at ‘sleeping giants’ in the charity sector, who have low traffic scores but ‘high authority’ referring to the stature and reputation of their organisation online.

Drinkaware tops this list, followed by Mental Health Foundation, Samaritans, Royal British Legion and Marie Curie.

They could be hindered by online technical or structural issues, Salience warns.

“Identification of those problems and dealing with them in priority order should be their key objective,” says Salience’s study.

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