Arthritis Care launches €˜People Like Us' appeal
Howard Lake | 8 October 2007 | News
Arthritis Care has launched a major campaign for awareness, membership recruitment and fundraising. It is centred around the charity’s website and uses a broad mix of off and online direct response media to drive people to a microsite.
The theme of ‘People Like Us’ focuses on the nine million people of all ages in the UK with arthritis.
Arthritis care won a BMA award for its website earlier this year. Rather than a static corporate site, it was created and developed by people with arthritis for interactive practical help, support and discussion. It offers an important two-way relationship and it’s very much driven by the people using it, said director of marketing and fundraising Jo O’Boyle.
Advertisement
Crucially our experience shows that people of all ages are using the site and that the notion that older people aren’t online is becoming outdated. Today’s web reach includes a large proportion of our traditionally older 65+ audience, so we want to significantly strengthen our web fundraising and recruitment functionality.
The heart of the campaign is a personal video diary shared by a wide range of people with arthritis that shows what it is like to live with the condition.
The campaign has been designed by agency Cascaid, and is testing all routes to online recruitment and fundraising as part of Arthritis Care’s long-term communications strategy. The charity’s first email activity to 7,000 individuals will kick off with personalised alerts about the forthcoming World Arthritis Day (12 October) with reminder emails being sent on the day and follow-up messages later.
Direct mail will target 76,000 people with segmentation of packs asking for membership, soft one-off donations and committed giving, but all will carry the message to take people to the microsite.
Related posts
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.