Last month’s CharityComms seminar featured presentations from another three charity communications experts who discussed integrated campaign techniques and brand repositioning. In this seminar we heard all about strategy – the strategy behind: a successful rebrand, award winning media campaign and a triumphant public appeal.
Rebranding Breast Cancer Care
The first speaker was Max du Bois, Executive Director of Spencer du Bois, who worked with Breast Cancer Care on their rebrand last year.
Breast Cancer Care had identified the need to rebrand because they knew they weren’t reaching as many people as they could, du Bois said.
One of the notable issues with their brand was that it did not differentiate the charity from other breast cancer organisations in the ‘pink fog’ (many of these charities also had pink in their brands), despite their unique offer.
After running internal brand building workshops and exploring the resulting options through focus groups with women with breast cancer, they identified that the key dual strengths of the organisation were its “professional experience” of evidential and therapeutic advice, and the “personal experience” that many of the staff had personally with breast cancer, enabling them to understand the issues and pressures surrounding the condition.
The value to women with breast cancer was the way this helped empower them to cope with their condition, often when they had had an unsupportive NHS experience or when they felt they had no-one to turn to.
After confirming the need to change their brand the research process began into what they wanted the brand to say. They ran external consultations as well as internal workshops to canvass the opinions of: people affected by breast cancer, supporters and potential individual and corporate donors.
It was agreed, even among the loyalists, that they wanted to update their current logo to move it away from the generic pink ribbon but without losing its important familiarity! The striped ribbon, reflecting the organisation’s values of evidence, empathy and the individual, appealed strongly to all - clearly carving out its territory. This became especially evident in the flexible way it is used across all communications to bond them into a single, powerful family.
The strategy behind the award winning Brain Donor Appeal
The next speakers were Sonya Roberts, formerly of Parkinson’s Disease Society (PDS), and Paul Thomas, Senior Consultant at Trimedia UK who worked with PDS on their Brain Donor Appeal.
To mark Parkinson's Awareness Week 2009, PDS launched a nationwide appeal for people to pledge to donate their brains for Parkinson's research. To get themselves into the media and raise awareness, they created a campaign with celebrities, good visuals, and an interesting hook.
Actress Jane Asher is the President of PDS and was a great asset for the charity, especially in terms of visuals, comment and video content. They had contacted several celebrities without any luck.
However, Jeremy Paxman agreed to get involved, saying, “Of course you can have my brain, I have nothing else to do with it”. This endorsement was not only good in the traditional celebrity sense, but also gave the media an angle, i.e. an intelligent brain.
Thomas said that this campaign was supported by the fact that they had meticulously worked out their timings in advance. He approached consumer magazines three months before to get coverage during the awareness week, and gave other journalists an indication of the campaign two months in advance.
One of Thomas’ best tips for shorter-notice stories was to approach the media on a Sunday, “the media never sleeps so get in there early, most people won’t do it until Monday.”
Their way-in-advance planning, celebrity endorsement and quirky angle helped make the campaign a success. Every national paper covered the story – some even twice. In five days the PDS had 738 pieces of media coverage.
How Save the Children planned and launched a successful campaign in four hours
The last speaker of the day was Joe Barrell, Director of Communications at Save the Children, who spoke about their campaign to help the children of Gaza, which was launched in January 2009.
Barrell said that the team at Save the Children “put it [the campaign] together in about four hours” and added “There is a lot of risk and uncertainty in a project like this, and we probably wouldn’t have done it if we'd sat down and planned it strategically.”
This campaign was different in that it was developed reactively to coincide with public attitude. It was bold in its asks and appearance.
They launched an integrated press campaign using adverts, fundraising call backs from text messages and social networking. Barrell said that Save the Children had a long history of using photography at the centre of its campaigning work, and this campaign used one main photograph.
For their Gaza campaign they used a photograph of a mother comforting her son after he finds out his uncle has died in the bombing by the Israeli air force.
This photograph (http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/en/7306.htm) was chosen because it captures the chaos of Gaza at the time, and also makes you connect at a personal level; you feel sympathy for the boy, and empathy for the mother who is trying to protect him.
Another of the campaign’s assets was that entry into Gaza was difficult for both journalists and NGOs, but Save the Children had a strong staff presence there, who were able to maintain media interest in the campaign.
The emotional power of the campaign helped to achieve Save the Children’s main aims of: showing the government there was demand among the UK public for a ceasefire, building awareness of their emergency response work, and raising funds for the children in Gaza.
Barrell concluded that if you are going to launch a topical campaign, flexibility is key, saying: “you cannot predict an emergency, but you can prepare for them, by putting good systems in place and encouraging a sense of readiness to respond quickly.”
To download any of these presentations in full, click here