The annual Christmas Starts with Christ advertising campaign is making in-roads into raising awareness about the true meaning of Christmas, according to a new ComRes survey.

When the high profile campaign launched six years ago, 51 per cent of adults thought the birth of Christ had no relevance to Christmas. Now ComRes says that 67 per cent of people thought that the Christmas message was conveyed effectively and 49 per cent of people felt that the advertising made them think more about the true meaning of Christmas.

The campaign is also impacting 18-24 year olds, with four out of ten saying they understand more about what Christmas actually means.

Christmas Starts with Christ is run by ChurchAds.net and is aimed at "helping churches to make Christ and the amazing story of his birth the focus of the nation’s favourite time of year." Each year it provides free resources for church use, including posters, radio ads, web banners and social media images, and is backed by a number of agencies and denominations including Baptists Together.

A record number of 4,500 churches joined the campaign last year. It is hoped 10,000 churches will make use of this year's material, which has just become available.

David Elcock, the Creative and Community Work Coordinator at Leigh Road Baptist Church, Leigh-on-Sea, said the campaign has been having an impact in his community.

'We’ve been using the excellent free Christmas Starts with Christ publicity resources since its launch,' he explained. 'The posters, radio ads and online media do provoke comment and discussion from those in our neighbourhood.

'We place the ads on the front page of the town's newspaper, delivered to 18,000 homes, and hand deliver invite postcards to 2,000 homes in our surrounding community. Last year we gave away the Christmas Starts with Christ Christmas tree prayer tags to hundreds of people at the town's light switch on. All of these things help us to have many relaxed conversations about the real reason for the season.'

Last year – the fifth anniversary of the Christmas Starts with Christ campaign – saw it become multi-platform driven, adding a significant increase in its digital and social media presence: it reached five million listeners on the Vodafone Top 20 network chart and Xfm, while the 1,000 people using the #ChristmasStarts hashtag gave a reach of just over 1.3 million people.

There were 22,000 downloads of posters, 9,000 downloads of the radio advertisements and 140,000 page views of the website.

Francis Goodwin, of ChurchAds.Net, said, 'When we started this campaign we were worried because 51 per cent of adults thought that the birth of Christ had no relevance to Christmas but research has shown that we are reversing this, especially among the 18 to 24-year-olds.

'If Christian organisations and churches remember just one thing, all of the material is FREE, FREE, FREE. There is nothing to pay, no permission to be sought, no rights sign-off to be had, just download them and use them.'

There are 16 posters, three radio ads, 10 web banners and a range of social media images, the campaign logo and a resource pack for churches to use this year.