Most innovative fundraising campaign
Howard Lake | 18 April 2008 | Blogs
For a campaign that shows significant innovation in fundraising. This award can be made either to an application specifically for this category or awarded to an entry in another category that shows a suitably innovative approach. Specific innovative ideas and new treatments of current fundraising techniques will also be considered, as will the adoption of existing practice in a new and innovative fashion, or in a sector where that practice has hitherto been little used.
Crisis Reverse Graffiti campaign
The single most innovative feature of this was the use of reverse graffiti. Instead of using paint or spray cans, water is used to clean dirt from walls through a stencil in the shape of a chosen design. This doesn’t damage property and, at the moment, is a legal grey area.
Crisis used this to create a design of a homeless person made up of the words ‘most homeless people have moved on but their problems haven’t gone away’ and included the website address. On the night of 18 January 2008 a team led by the man who invented reverse graffiti set out on the streets of London and created the design at 15 locations. Photos of the design were used in press releases to all local and London media, myspace and facebook accounts were used to generate viral interest online and 500,000 regular giving inserts were placed within London media titles.
This was set to happen in January so Crisis could draw attention to the work it carries out throughout the year, not just at Christmas. It aimed to draw people to Crisis’s website and from there to the campaign microsite that had a similar ‘street’ look and feel about it.
It attracted over 50 examples of PR, saw 120,000 visits made to the Crisis website and 8,221 visits to the microsite. Sixty new regular givers have been recruited. Crisis is considering using a similar campaign in the future.
Prostate Cancer Research Foundation
Give a few bob
This campaign brought Bob Monkhouse back from the dead to talk about losing his battle with prostate cancer. With complete support form his widow, Bob’s popularly was used to create impact, achieve cut-through and generate word of mouth, thus putting prostate cancer on the national agenda.
As well as the film, media owners gave space for posters, displayed free of charge nationwide. The Sun agreed to an exclusive launch of the campaign and there was wide tv and radio coverage.
The charity also sent out its first dm appeal on the back of this. The whole appeal has been so successful and reached such high levels of awareness that it is now developing beyond the initial campaign. It created and is still creating a huge amount of free media and PR.
Soil Association box scheme insert
This integrated web, insert and PR campaign aimed to recruit new members to the Soil Association and targeted organic box scheme customers by encouraging box scheme operators to distribute recruitment materials.
Everything had to be right: targeted message, quality materials, strong joining offer delivered at the right time (during Organic Fortnight in September 2007), across the right media and all delivered in a way that reinforced partners’ core message and delivered a tangible reciprocal benefit for them.
Box scheme operators had to benefit too, so an article was featured on the whyorganic website linked to a further podcast that extolled the environmental benefits of local and organic food. This was linked to a listing of the 96 participating box scheme operators.
The Soil Association will be replicating and building on the campaign this year.
Ninety-six operators were engaged who distributed 85,000 recruitment packs from which 627 new members were recruited, with a further 157 signing up online. The average annual value is £34 and the cost per recruit was £17.
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.