The @ActionAidUK campaign everyone is talking about
Andrew Robinson, Campaign Manager with ActionAid, has written an exclusive guest blog post on the thinking behind their latest campaign, which has had everyone talking…
With our new campaign, What a feeling!, we’re putting our supporters feelings front and centre and celebrating what they get back from transforming poor people’s lives.
ActionAid’s brand is all about people ending poverty (rather than things) because we see poverty as something that is man-made. Therefore people power – both here in the UK but also crucially in developing communities – can end poverty.
For us this normally manifests itself in communications which powerfully tell the story of poor people but with this campaign we felt we wanted to try something different to really grab people’s attention and inspire them to act.
The big insight for us came simply from talking with our supporters. We spoke to a lot of people but the thing that came up again and again was that, whilst they were concerned about making the biggest amount of difference to as many people as possible, they all recognised that they got as much, if not more, back than what they gave in time and money.
What our supporters got back wasn’t material, but was a whole range of really powerful emotions. In some case (like Silvia who features in our advertising) what they experienced inspired them to completely change their lives. We realised we were a conduit to helping people discover something really profound and really amazing and we wanted to celebrate that.
We tested the idea with our supporters in a few ways. We started by asking people on Facebook and got some great responses. We made a film of what our supporters felt about ActionAid. We then emailed our supporters and asked them to watch the film and then tell us how it feels for them. You can see the most recent responses here. All of these things came together to indicate that we had a proposition that really resonates.
The campaign is out now in a whole range of media including tube cards, cross track, press, radio, inserts and online (including social media). We also kicked off the campaign with our Happy Bubble event near Liverpool Street station where we tried to bring to life some of incredible feelings that our supporters described – like using a space hopper to recreate Jono’s little leap or a big blue monster for Sarah’s warm hug.
We’re directing traffic to the ActionAid website where we want people to take a short quiz where they can find out what their ActionAid feeling might be like. We then ask people for their information so we can have a chat with them about how they can get involved.
At every stage we’re trying to be supporter focused – doing things that meet needs and are in their interests, rather than framing everything in a way that benefits ActionAid.
This campaign is very different from anything we’ve tried before and we’re really eager to see the results. We’ve had some really positive comments about the ads so we’re looking forward to building from this great initial response.
This is a brilliant blog. I am totally onboard with reaching out and finding out what supporters really feel. It is so powerful when communicating messages to prospective supporters. Superb stuff guys, keep it up 🙂
As a marketeer at heart, Just watching and reading about this activity has been pleasure and of course it is of huge interest to the third sector. ActionAid have hit all the angles they needed to and more! A real key example of how to run a multi channel media campaign, and to be fair I imagine a few marketing orgs could learn a lot from this.The key points are of course that the best way to end poverty is to take direct action against it. Challenges have the same approach in the way that we work with Social business in developing countries.Secondly focussing on the benefits to the volunteer is key. My personal opinion is that the best volunteers are the people who are in it to learn, improve themselves and gain something (knowledge/skills/humility) from those they are helping. The benefits of giving cannot, I believe, be underestimated. So well done Actionaid! I look forward to reading more about you in future.
Really good to get an insight on the thoughts behind this campaign. As you’ll know Ross, I was also inspired to delve deeper, as I think it’s a very decisive change of tack in charity marketing. I’ll shamelessly link to my AskCharity blog – only because it makes a nice companion piece to this one 🙂 http://askcharity.org.uk/blog/2011/01/serendipity-integration-and-chance-taking-actionaid-uk%E2%80%99s-campaign/
Great campaign and extremely thought provoking for us fundraisers! Making sure the donor is at the heart of fundraising is something that a lot of us are striving for but this is taking it to the nth degree! However, I don’t think that this would work so well for a charity with a lesser known brand. Action Aid has been using cause related advertising, DM and the rest to fundraise for many years now (with great success!) and I should think that now they are in a position that their cause is so well known that just the use of their name conjures the cause – fighting poverty. For a smaller brand, I I don’t think an approach like this which has no mention of the cause would work so well ….But I’d be interested in trying a combo of the two!!It is great to see innovation like this in fundraising – even for charities without such great brand recognition or perhaps the resources to launch such a large scale campaign it is incredibly inspiring and is a reminder that we need to always strive for new ideas and better experiences for our supporters. And that integrated campaigns like this, and MND’s Patrick the Optimist campaign are the ones that can really get people talking.Am looking forward to finding out how the public respond to this and if it does achieve their fundraising goals.
Hi,Thanks for the positive comments. It’s really encouraging to see the buzz around the campaign.Thanks,Andy
Thanks for the comments everyone, some interesting points in there. Like Lesley I’d be interested to see how the public respond to the campaign.Fancy writing a follow up guest post in the future Andy?