It can be difficult to convince clients of the benefits of innovative digital techniques. The charity sector has been more adventurous than most, creating genuinely engaging interactive work that generates impressive response rates.
Charities need to extract the maximum value from their marketing budgets, and across a wide range of organisations, the results demonstrate that richer digital experiences deliver more donations. In other words, investment in more creative vehicles pays off.
Innovation involves taking advantage of the opportunities offered by social media, user-generated content, virals, gaming, virtual worlds and multimedia. For homelessness charity Crisis, simply transforming the now traditional e-card into a video card led to a massive uplift in donations, raising over £1m in a short period of time.
Some charities are even raising money from the virtual world. For a number of years The American Cancer Society has benefited from a virtual 'walkathon' in Second Life. Relay for Life is organised by a volunteer community, and last year's event attracted more than 1,700 avatar participants, who raised around $118,000 (£59,661).
Elsewhere, Kiva - a website that distributes loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world - connects lenders to their chosen beneficiary. This means the lender can see the effect of their generosity.
And many other charities are using digital thinking to further their causes. Friends of The Earth's thebigask.com employs user-generated content to argue for a climate-change law. Hundreds of individuals have shown their support by uploading their own videos, while 200,000 people have contacted their MP. The result is a Climate Change Bill due to be voted on later this year. That's a pretty impressive response.
Similarly, the NSPCC's 'Don't Hide It' campaign used social networking sites to encourage young people to speak out about child abuse. More than a million children were drawn to the campaign, which used a range of online communities including Bebo, Habbo, Piczop, MyKindaPlace and AOL Teens.
This kind of approach illustrates the importance of identifying the environments in which an audience is interacting, and being clear about what will spur engagement.
Many audiences, for example, enjoy games, and these can be used in a variety of ways. Last year a simple in-banner game for WWF resulted in the charity's best-ever click-through rates, outperforming more traditional banner approaches by around 200 per cent.
Games can be simple or complex. The British Heart Foundation (BHF) recently launched an incredibly immersive online game as part of its Food4Thought campaign (see case study). It is easy to spend 30 minutes or more playing the game, which takes place in a beautifully rendered 3-D world. Getting even five minutes of anyone's time is a real achievement in these time-pressured days, and BHF knows it takes commitment, investment, genuine innovation and obsessive attention to detail to connect with an audience.
Such approaches also illustrate that moving away from traditional direct channels enables charities to reach beyond their normal constituencies to younger people. This is vital for wooing new donors.
However, almost half of all UK charities involved in individual donor fundraising do not even have an email marketing programme. They need to think about getting their skates on.
Rik Haslam, WWAV Rapp Collins
POWER POINTS
- Take advantage of the opportunities offered by social media, gaming, virtual worlds and viral approaches
- Identify your audience's environment and be clear about what they will engage with
CASE STUDY - BRITISH HEART FOUNDATION
Childhood obesity is a growing problem, and it is predicted that a quarter of British kids will be obese by 2050. In a bid to reach children directly and educate them about their diet, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) has created a digital element to its ongoing Food4Thought campaign.
The foundation launched its campaign three years ago to raise awareness of the damaging effects of obesity and to stop junk food being marketed to children. "We recently decided to go digital with this campaign to speak directly to kids in a way that would be appealing and easy to understand," says David Barker, head of communications at BHF. "Childhood obesity is the new smoking. Getting kids to think about the choices they make and get active is now the core business of BHF."
Avenue A Razorfish designed an online game where players guide their character around a city, stopping to do tasks that expose hidden marketing messages. The game, which is aimed at 11- to 13-year-olds, is supported by a teachers' pack that has been sent out nationally to more than 3,000 schools. Banner ads leading directly to the website have so far received over a million clicks. Barker says: "The campaign has been phenomenally successful and we plan to follow it up later in the year."
Sarah Johnson