Red Nose Day 09 – Digital Campaign
Howard Lake | 7 May 2009 | News
Red Nose Day 09 has so far raised a ground breaking £65,699,850 producing the highest on the night total in its 21 year history. The night of TV saw a peak audience of 12.3 million.
The Red Nose Day campaign ran for six weeks leading up to Friday 13 March and a core component of this strategy was the digital campaign, encompassing all the Red Nose Day activity across new media & interactive platforms. For the first time, the penetration and use of broadband meant the opportunity existed for digital in its own right to play a significant role in the success of Red Nose Day as a whole.
Top line results for the digital campaign:
Rednoseday.com
The rednoseday.com website peaked at 580,000 unique visitors a day and over the campaign as a whole attracted over 2.5million unique visits. This was from a start of 27,000 unique users on launch day on Thursday 29 January.
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BBC Multiplatform
The partnership with BBC Multiplatform resulted in ground breaking content and features across BBC online and BBC iPlayer. This included clickable noses ‘peeking out’ on most BBC online pages, driving to relevant content on rednoseday.com. There was a complete takeover of CBBC with a sharing of games and other feature content. BBC iPlayer featured exclusive content and on Saturday 14 March, BBC iPlayer reported that all ten of its most requested content spots were taken up by Red Nose Day content. A key element of the BBC’s Red Nose Day site this year was the day to day coverage of the Kilimanjaro climb. Audiences could catch up on the day’s adventures via video diaries from the mountain which could be accessed via the radio one and Red Nose Day pages.
All partners
All Red Nose Day partners, such as Sainsbury’s, TK Maxx, BT & Subway supported the campaign with an integrated digital approach resulting in maximum impact across, social media activity and the spread of unique viral content.
Mobile Phones
An extraordinary £7.8 million was raised for Red Nose Day through £1 and £5 text donations. It was the first time the public had been able to text knowing that every penny would go to Comic Relief, thanks to mobile operators waiving their usual fees and the Treasury confirming that because of this no VAT will be charged on these donations.
Social media
A ground breaking agreement with Facebook resulted in the sale of a fundraising ‘gift’ red nose, with a 100% donation to Red Nose Day. On the night a large number of our 225,000 Facebook fans were interacting with celebs and commenting on the TV show live. A Red Nose Day Facebook hackathon took place and a winning ‘Donate Your Status’ application went live to aid the campaign.
A celebrity presenter hosted each of the social network Red Nose Day pages – with Harry Hill on Facebook, Scott Mills on Youtube, George Sampson on Bebo and Alex Zane on MySpace generating much interest and interactivity.
Twitter was utilised as the only outlet where people could follow the ‘BT Red Nose Climb’ live. This is estimated to have been followed live by over 175,000 people across Twitter (22,000 followers) and the feed being embedded in bbc.co.uk and rednoseday.com.
iTunes
The Red Nose Day digital campaign dominated the iTunes charts with unique iPhone noses and applications, classic content and this years best sketches (available for purchase or download immediately following broadcast of the programme), a weekly podcast and the two Red Nose Day singles also reached number one and number two in their respective charts.
For the first time ever, for a 48 hour period, Comic Relief turned the UK Singles Chart red. 20p from any Top 40 song downloaded via the iTunes UK store as listed in the midweek charts went to Comic Relief.
Content (video & viral)
Over 50 short films were made exclusively for the web and included a ‘Comic Relief commercial’ by Fallon and a ‘Cadbury’s eyebrow’ spoof by the noses (400,000 views between them). Over five million views have been generated for Red Nose Day content. For the first time piracy and monetisation of the content was managed at source, enabling this content to become a further income source for the charity.
E-mail Activity
A comprehensive email strategy was carried out to generate as much interaction with the various Comic Relief ‘interested’ databases and across the social networks. Unprecedented levels of ‘take up’ and participation in fundraising or organising for Red Nose Day was achieved with over 116,000 people clicking through to renoseday.com from an email received.
The Noses
The three Red Noses were animated for the digital campaign and the TV branding were run with the same overall look and feel. These were made available online for users to make their own web films – resulting in over 50 Red Nose user generated content films on YouTube. A digital Red Nose was sold for the first time online at microsite digitalrednose.com, to compliment the ‘real life’ Red Noses, generating £20,000 of sales.
Ends
For further Information:
Sophie King, Press Office
020 7820 6942
s.****@*************rg.uk
Comic Relief’s vision is to create a just world, free from poverty
Comic Relief, registered charity 326568 (England / Wales); SC039730 (Scotland)
Comic Relief spends all the money raised giving extremely poor and disadvantaged people in the UK and Africa a helping hand to turn their lives around
The Red Nose Day campaign was managed and co-ordinated in-house at Comic Relief with support in specific areas from the following agencies; Digital Outlook, Fallon, Blue State Digital, Superfad, Raycomm, Big Mouth Media, My Video Rights, Twestival, Amberlight, 7th Chamber.
The Comic Relief promise
In order to run itself in a professional and effective way Comic Relief incurs necessary significant costs. Raising funds, making grants and organisational overheads cost real money.
Despite these costs, Comic Relief is still able to promise that for every pound the charity gets directly from the public a pound goes to helping transform the lives of people living with poverty and social injustice. If Red Nose Day raises £50 million, Comic Relief will spend at least £50 million doing just that.
It can make this promise because its operating budget is covered in cash or in kind from all types of supporters like corporate sponsors and donors, suppliers, generous individuals and government (including Gift Aid) as well as from investment income and interest.
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.