Shaking up our approach to video storytelling for Stand Up To Cancer
Stand Up To Cancer is a joint campaign that we deliver in partnership with Channel 4. You may have seen the biannual live show or programming like The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up To Cancer.
As a sub brand that attracts a younger audience, Stand Up To Cancer has its own social media channels that are separate to the main Cancer Research UK channels.
We work with Channel 4 to deliver appeal films that are shown during our programming. They focus on people’s cancer experience: their diagnosis, the harrowing treatment, and the devastating impact it has on their life. The films have been very successful in highlighting to TV audiences the importance of Cancer Research UK and motivating audiences to support the cause by donating.
However it’s important that our website and social channels can engage audiences outside of TV programming. With this in mind, we reviewed our video storytelling and saw there was an opportunity to produce video content with a different feel and share the stories of the people behind the illness.
We had tried this before but…
We created a series of social-first patient stories in 2017. These were 3–4 minute long films shot in a studio that focussed on 3 patient experiences. When shared organically on our social channels but they didn’t gain much traction.
They weren’t very distinct from the appeal films or from standard case study films from other charities and didn’t stand out in social media feeds. I’m always happy to go bold with content in the right context, so I set about investigating how we could shake up our approach to these films.
Our new approach
1. We identified what stories performed well with our audience
This is key if you’re trying something a bit new. You need to have some evidence that this will work and that this is going to be something that your audience wants or needs in its social feed. This will also help you later on when getting stakeholders on board.
Over the past year and a half we’d seen incredible engagement on posts that had an uplifting, inspiring or cheeky vibe. Short, rough videos shot on mobile phones also performed better than polished to perfection footage.
This was a great find but also created a challenge: to be careful to not downplay people’s experience of cancer. Cancer is a horrible and cruel disease. We needed to maintain some of that raw element while taking a “people-first” approach to our storytelling and telling their story, not just their cancer story.
2. We looked for inspiration outside the charity sector
We took a diverse approach to finding inspiration. I think there can be a tendency within charity sector to just look at what your competitors are doing. Going broader can help you identify characteristics of successful content and how to grab the attention of a colder audience.
One video that we love is this video created by the BBC. It shows a singer coping with hair loss caused by cancer by getting a wonderful henna crown.
It’s a great example of an uplifting story that focused on more than just her cancer story. It went viral for the BBC. When we re-shared the BBC post on our Facebook account, it had more engagement than the original post on the BBC.
Humans of New York and the intimate moments they share from ordinary people were also a big inspiration for us, along with 60 second docs. 60 second docs, as the name suggests, create 1 minute long documentaries about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
3. We collaborated
It’s all very well saying that we wanted to strong, uplifting stories that would make people stop and pay attention. But we needed to source them, and Cancer Research is a big organisation. So this sort of task can take a lot of time and emails. I created a working group with reps from our PR Team, Social Media Team and the Media Volunteer Liaison Team.
The benefit of getting everyone together meant I could get everyone on the same page with the plan and examples of the stories we were looking for, meaning we were able to find stories quickly and efficiently. We also worked better together, aligning our story angles with PR and getting input from the social team helped make sure stories worked well on different channels. Feedback on the final films was also done as a group activity to reduce the likelihood of conflicting feedback and suggestions.
We quickly found our five storytellers.
Between them they were tackling subjects like:
- Blogging about vaginal cancer.
- How hard it can be to admit you’re ill and afraid as a man.
- Having a tattoo after a mastectomy.
- How amputations or childhood leukaemia didn’t stop ambition.
We kept the budget relatively small, working with just a 2 person production agency.
Amanda’s film is below. See the rest on our YouTube channel.
4. We were agile
With these stories we didn’t just take a blanket approach when it came to sharing them on our channels and putting media spend behind them. We tailored our targeting depending on the video and depending on how it performed when we shared it organically. We also trialled splitting the targeting across paid Facebook and Instagram later on in the campaign, which proved beneficial, giving us better cut through on Instagram, and so we continued combined placement for the remaining videos.
Was in worth it?
Yes.
The campaign had a reach of 2 million and nearly 1 million views. I appreciate that these results might not mean a lot out of context. The reach is nearly three times the size of the audience on our Facebook and Instagram channels. Organically the content outperformed the Stand Up To Cancer average, and the paid activity significantly outperformed previous paid campaigns.
Having lots of views and a wide reach was great and what we were aiming for. And although this was a social first campaign, we actually secured lots of PR coverage for our three women both regionally and nationally.
We didn’t secure any PR coverage for our men however — this was a shame as the male audience can be hard to reach with health information. We will consider what we can do to ensure the male voices get a better representation.
What’s next?
We’re really proud of this project but we’re not done here. Reaching this many people is just the start of the journey. We can build on how we benefit from having such a wide reach and make this content work harder for us to get more tangible results beyond views and reach.
- We’re trialling taking a full UGC approach and handing the reigns over to media volunteers, with a brief to guide them.
- We’re reaching out to media volunteers that are actively sharing their stories on social media and engaged with other people within the cancer community.
- We’re sharing our learnings with Channel 4 and will be creating an appeal video using archived UGC content from a YouTube vlogger who sadly passed away last year.
We’re looking forward to creating more video content and learning more about our audience.
