CharityComms

The English feel sorry for the blind man’s dog, Vladimir Nabokov once observed.

Any glance at the UK charity sector bears him out. While the RSPCA has a very high recognition rate, almost three-quarters of the population are unable to name a single organisation concerned with disability. The nation finds it easier to engage with animals than with disabled people.

Leonard Cheshire Disability’s new campaign seeks to change this attitude – by using talking animals.

Creature Discomforts is a series of animated adverts made by Wallace & Gromit creators Aardman Animations, in the style of their popular Creature Comforts characters.

The Great British public

“Creature Comforts are well-recognised and well-loved by the Great British public,” says Judith Barnard, Communications Director at Leonard Cheshire Disability. “The animated characters turned out to be very effective, because they can say more powerful and hard-hitting things. With animation, people automatically let their guard down and engage with the characters, rather than seeing it’s about disability and turning off.”

“Turning off” is a problem disabled charities often encounter. Before coming up with Creature Discomforts, Leonard Cheshire Disability and their appointed advertising agency, Freud Communications, carried out extensive market research. Approaches successfully adopted by charities in other fields failed to grab the public’s interest.

“There were some confrontational ideas, and some clever and witty ones, but we found people were unresponsive,” Judith explains. “They turned their backs on the confrontational ones and didn’t ‘get’ the clever ones.”

Real people

The power of Creature Discomforts comes in the contrast between the whimsical characters – a sausage dog with wheels for hind legs, a stick insect with a walking stick – and the naturalistic dialogue. The words aren’t scripted, but were taken directly from tapes of interviews with real people.

“We talked to people at great length up and down the country,” explains Judith. “We ended up with 40 hours of interviews. We went through all of these and picked up key themes and issues, then found the comments that best encapsulated them.”

The Aardman team listened to these voices and imagined the characters behind them, without meeting the interviewees – who themselves had had no idea their voices were going to be used in a major advertising campaign. In the event, all concerned loved their characters.

Judith is full of praise for the attention Aardman gave the project. “They were also happy to let us hijack the name Creature Discomforts,” she adds.

Phenomenal coverage

The television campaign is backed up by radio and print ads, but Creature Discomforts has already secured plenty of extra airtime and column inches. The campaign was launched on November 12th, along with the charity’s Disability Review 2007, an in-depth study based on interviews with over 1000 people.

“The media coverage has been phenomenal,” says Judith. “We were on the Today programme and BBC breakfast television, and the story sustained throughout the day. We were really impressed with the way the media picked up on our statistics and underlying messages, and the disabled people behind the adverts were very prominent too.”

Universal appeal

Leonard Cheshire Disability also put a lot of work into getting coverage in the local media, Judith adds: “We had 40 or 50 other people around the country who’d worked with us in the initial interviews and who had a story to tell.”

In the YouTube era, adverts can take on a life of their own, and this is another part of the strategy:

“We’ve put quite a bit of effort into the online side, because the films appeal to all ages,” says Judith. “We’ve seeded them all online, and we’re having a big push on Christmas e-cards. There’s an international impact too – they’ve been picked up in Japan, South Africa, New Zealand, Italy, Spain, Brazil… the characters have a universal appeal.”

Raising the profile

The aim of the campaign is very much on raising awareness and changing attitudes – it’s not about self-promotion. All the same, it seems to have raised the profile of Leonard Cheshire Disability: “More media enquiries on disability issues now come to us first,” says Judith. “We’re also getting a lot of enquiries from people wanting to use the animations in their equality training.”

This is the first consumer-facing campaign that Leonard Cheshire Disability has run for ten years, and it’s a long-term strategy. The plan is for a twice-yearly push in January and July, and a new round of adverts is in the pipeline, featuring younger disabled people and a wider range of disabilities.

Creature Discomforts might appear to be a high concept campaign, but Judith insists it was quite the opposite. “Normally you’ll come up with an idea, script it and resource it,” she says, “but this campaign’s message really evolved from the bottom up. That gives it an authenticity.”

Leonard Cheshire Disability
http://www.lcdisability.org

Watch the Creature Discomfort ads
http://www.creaturediscomforts.org