# Three takeaways from Diabetes UK’s launch year of Dress Diabolical

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2015/12/10/three-takeaways-from-diabetes-uks-launch-year-of-dress-diabolical/
- Published: 2015-12-10T21:42:46+00:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**Diabetes UK held its first mass participation non-sporting fundraising event at
Halloween. Natalie Fischer, Development Manager at Diabetes UK, shares three lessons
learnt from developing Dress Diabolical.**

## 1. Do you want to tap or challenge a behaviour?

Diabetes UK already has a successful mass participation event – Spring’s [Swim22](https://swim22.diabetes.org.uk/)–
so working with large audiences isn’t new to us. However, we wanted to build appeal
to people beyond sport with an event we could build on year on year.

We hired an agency to work up some ideas and one stood out: [Dress Diabolical](https://www.fundraising.co.uk/2015/10/22/diabetes-uks-introduces-fancy-dress-halloween-fundraising-event/).
Interestingly, they didn’t suggest it as a Halloween-specific event. But with Halloween
proving to be one of the few calendar dates without a charity event based on it 
at the time, it was a no-brainer to put the two together.

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Picking Halloween also answered one of the basic questions facing a new campaign:
are you looking to challenge people’s behaviour, such as [RNLI’s H2Only](https://www.fundraising.co.uk/2014/05/02/rnli-challenge-supporters-go-h2only/)
campaign, or tap into an ingrained behaviour, like dressing up for Halloween?

This lent itself to targeting groups of people who would be together on the day 
of Dress Diabolical, the Friday before Halloween. We had lots of school classes 
dress up in support of pupils with Type 1 diabetes and will be specifically targeting
schools next year. And offices were also targeted as a ripe environment to ask people
to dress up: we are looking to make the sign-up process easier for businesses to
get more workplaces involved next year.

## 2. Raid your knowledge base, but make it relevant to the new event

![Dress Diabolical - Halloween event for Diabetes UK](https://wfay6x.infiniteuploads.
cloud/2022/01/dress-diabolical-three.webp)

Dress Diabolical – Halloween event for Diabetes UK

Starting to piece together the operations for the event brought up daunting questions:
how would people get signed up? How would we track income? What supporter journey
would we put in place? And what data would we collect?
We could answer each of these
questions from our existing events experience; the challenge was answering them 
in a coherent way that ensured all roads led back to the event itself.

The solution: run everything through a [microsite](https://dressdiabolical.diabetes.org.uk/).
It served as a central repository for all information, resources and inspiration,
with a clear sign-up point to get people involved. It was also a clear home for 
downloadable materials and event updates to build interest until the big day. The
microsite became the centre of the whole operation.

## 3. Get people to sign up and finesse the fundraising ask

Dress Diabolical’s clear theme meant it was no surprise that the marketing was a
success. An early set of photos of skeletons and witches going about their daily
work was a hit from day one. We produced in-house a video developing the theme, 
which was named as [The Drum’s Halloween Video of the Day](http://www.thedrum.com/news/2015/10/31/halloween-ad-day-diabetes-uk-dress-diabolical).

And we even secured a quote from Tim Burton to back our campaign (“The strange picture
of ghosts, goblins, pirates and vampires walking the streets of the UK appeals to
me on many levels,” he said). Together they provided our social media and press 
teams with lots of resources to promote the campaign.

![Director Tim Burton supported the campaign - photo: Leah Gallo](https://wfay6x.
infiniteuploads.cloud/2022/01/tim-burton-credit-leah-gallo.webp)

Director Tim Burton supported the campaign – photo: Leah Gallo

The marketing helped drive sign-up, but the question remained on whether we wanted
to ask people to text to donate to take part, or get them to seek sponsorship. In
the end we led on a sponsorship ask, while also including a text to donate number.
With revenue coming in from both, we will be looking at which is the best option
to provide a clear ask next year.

We’ve built a strong base and positive supporter feedback. Our social media channels
were flooded with dressed-up supporters on the day, reaching over 650,000 impressions
on social media, and the videos were viewed over 125,000 times. The evidence suggests
that lots of people will be back in costume next year. We are now reviewing all 
the evidence to get hundreds more people to join them. After all, there are only
334 costume shopping days until next Halloween…
 

_[Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGMILNL\_KGU no longer available]._

_**Natalie Fischer** is Development Manager at [Diabetes UK](http://diabetes.org.uk/)._

 * **[Dress Diabolical was back again of course in 2016](https://fundraising.co.uk/2016/10/27/5-spook-tacular-2016-halloween-fundraising-events/).**