So-called awareness campaigns are propaganda and typically a marketing campaign for the for-profit entities behind the non-profit. For example, celebrities are typically invovled in such campaigns, but the campaigns always have the planned side effect tied of increasing the celebrities' sales and public image, as they are tied in with performances and marketing campaigns. Not only that, but the celebrities are reducing their own tax bill in the process. It's really a way to market yourself and have all the related activity you engage in generate tax deductions for you.
The "non-profit" organization is really a tax-exempt conduit for sales to flow through to profit-making medical businesses and to pay the salaries of the staff of the "non-profit".
Consider the money flow if a tax-exempt organization funds medical research.
Normally, pharmaceutical and other medical businesses would spend money on research; such spending is an expense that directly lowers net income, or
EBITDA.
If charitable organization pays the for-profit pharm company $1,000 towards funding their research, that's $1,000 of no-effort sales, so the specified research expenses are covered without denting income. It's revenue where there otherwise would be no revenue. Just imagine going to your auto mechanic, paying your bill then smiling and handing him an extra $500, and saying he has to spend that on a new piece of equipment. Sure, thanks !
Perhaps the other organization helps actually do some of the research itself; things like conducting clinical trial tests, i.e., managing the process of signing up volunteer test subjects, administering the experimental medicine and the placebo, tracking, monitoring and reporting the results to pharmaceutical companies, etc. Say the effort spends $200,000 for a clinical trial. Now we have work done that the pharmaceutical companies would otherwise have to have paid for. If they paid for this effort, they would have spent $200,000, but since they did not, their expenses are $200,000 lower than they would be if they paid for their the research effort, but they have the results which are "donated" to them. In this case, their profit is $200,000 higher than it would have been if they did their own research.
Thus, if you really track the money flow, donations to medical charities are really an indirect pass-thru to net income or sales for the medical industry.