The One Brand’s ‘I Am Stela’ campaign
In a world with 7.1 billion inhabitants, it’s often hard for brands to be heard above the noise and din of the day-to-day. And it’s much more difficult to engage with billions of citizens if you’re a charity or not-for-profit organisation with limited budgets.
A recent report found giving has fallen by 20% in the last year, making it increasingly challenging to attract new supporters and re-engage old ones. To address this some charities are teaming up with digital and media brands, borrowing their marketing expertise to better their reach and engagement with the public. It’s what we, The One Brand, have done with marketing cloud software and services company Responsys, and it has helped us to inject innovation into our marketing practices.
The One Brand donates 100% of its profits from sales of everyday essential products such as bottled water, eggs and toilet tissue, to fund humanitarian projects in developing countries. As a result, our consumers and supporters play a key role in funding life-changing projects. So we took the decision to re-evaluate our marketing strategy, focusing more on improving relationships with supporters. However, with a marketing budget incomparable to those of big brands and charities, we had to be savvy about how we were using resources to generate awareness.
It was agreed that an integrated, cross-channel approach was the best way to provide the biggest bang for The One Brand’s buck. But the first challenge was how to pull together the wealth of data supporters shared or generated – who they are, which channels they use to interact with the brand – into one place. Once integrated, cleaned and centralised, the intelligence could be used to better engage supporters, through more innovative means.
In conjunction with communications agency, Third City, we designed a campaign called ‘I am Stela’ – built around the idea that any one of us could have been born as Stela, a young Kenyan girl brought up in drought-stricken east Africa. Children born in the UK don’t have to spend hours each day walking to collect water, so crucially, they are able to attend school. By raising awareness of the plight of people such as Stela, the hope is to highlight how a simple change to buying One branded products can help.
Working with Responsys, the campaign used a combination of email and social media to encourage supporters to subscribe to the mailing list. A video was also created featuring celebrities including Simon Pegg, Claudia Winkleman and Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Subscribers were asked to pledge their support and share the video via social media platforms to increase the reach of the campaign. Email underpinned the campaign by driving subscribers to social channels, encouraging them to participate and interact with it.
So what were the results? The campaign helped to re-engage our community of almost 250,000 Facebook fans and an active Twitter following. In addition, the email re-permissions programme (re-engaging with supporters who have become inactive to bring them back into the conversation) achieved successful re-permissions from 28% of recipients – a performance increase of 1,300% above average. The overall email campaign achieved a unique open rate of 46% and 37% of those who opened the email chose to opt-in. The upshot of these results is a much richer database of subscribers that are really engaged with us.
For a cause to be heard – either from a charity or a brand with a corporate social responsibility or sustainability initiative – it’s important to go where the supporters are. In today’s digital age, this means capitalising on the most recent wave of communication innovation – social media platforms, mobile devices and rich media platforms like YouTube – to build a supporter base.
For us, being able to harness digital channels has enabled The One Brand to foster engaging relationships with supporters globally, and ultimately turn marketing into a force for good.
Ian Spooner is head of brand development at The One Brand
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In a world with 7.1 billion inhabitants, it’s often hard for brands to be heard above the noise and din of the day-to-day. And it’s much more difficult to engage with billions of citizens if you’re a charity or not-for-profit organisation with limited budgets.
A recent report found giving has fallen by 20% in the last year, making it increasingly challenging to attract new supporters and re-engage old ones. To address this some charities are teaming up with digital and media brands, borrowing their marketing expertise to better their reach and engagement with the public. It’s what we, The One Brand, have done with marketing cloud software and services company Responsys, and it has helped us to inject innovation into our marketing practices.
The One Brand donates 100% of its profits from sales of everyday essential products such as bottled water, eggs and toilet tissue, to fund humanitarian projects in developing countries. As a result, our consumers and supporters play a key role in funding life-changing projects. So we took the decision to re-evaluate our marketing strategy, focusing more on improving relationships with supporters. However, with a marketing budget incomparable to those of big brands and charities, we had to be savvy about how we were using resources to generate awareness.
It was agreed that an integrated, cross-channel approach was the best way to provide the biggest bang for The One Brand’s buck. But the first challenge was how to pull together the wealth of data supporters shared or generated – who they are, which channels they use to interact with the brand – into one place. Once integrated, cleaned and centralised, the intelligence could be used to better engage supporters, through more innovative means.
In conjunction with communications agency, Third City, we designed a campaign called ‘I am Stela’ – built around the idea that any one of us could have been born as Stela, a young Kenyan girl brought up in drought-stricken east Africa. Children born in the UK don’t have to spend hours each day walking to collect water, so crucially, they are able to attend school. By raising awareness of the plight of people such as Stela, the hope is to highlight how a simple change to buying One branded products can help.
Working with Responsys, the campaign used a combination of email and social media to encourage supporters to subscribe to the mailing list. A video was also created featuring celebrities including Simon Pegg, Claudia Winkleman and Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Subscribers were asked to pledge their support and share the video via social media platforms to increase the reach of the campaign. Email underpinned the campaign by driving subscribers to social channels, encouraging them to participate and interact with it.
So what were the results? The campaign helped to re-engage our community of almost 250,000 Facebook fans and an active Twitter following. In addition, the email re-permissions programme (re-engaging with supporters who have become inactive to bring them back into the conversation) achieved successful re-permissions from 28% of recipients – a performance increase of 1,300% above average. The overall email campaign achieved a unique open rate of 46% and 37% of those who opened the email chose to opt-in. The upshot of these results is a much richer database of subscribers that are really engaged with us.
For a cause to be heard – either from a charity or a brand with a corporate social responsibility or sustainability initiative – it’s important to go where the supporters are. In today’s digital age, this means capitalising on the most recent wave of communication innovation – social media platforms, mobile devices and rich media platforms like YouTube – to build a supporter base.
For us, being able to harness digital channels has enabled The One Brand to foster engaging relationships with supporters globally, and ultimately turn marketing into a force for good.
Ian Spooner is head of brand development at The One Brand
Get more articles like this sent direct to your inbox by signing up for free membership to the Guardian Media Network– this content is brought to you by Guardian Professional.