Activity in: Engage

Keeping your audience engaged is a constant battle, yet incredibly important if you want to reach the final wing of Taking Action. We need to ensure that we are sharing a concrete message, not adding too many action points and making it clear to our audience what exactly we are trying to say/share.

I find that it is a tough balance between sharing a compelling story vs. sharing too much and trying to showcase all your work. For example, ShelterBox provides a whole suite of aid including tents, ShelterKits (to repair homes and damaged structures), solar lighting, water purification equipment, and much more. Rather than highlighting all our aid items, we should pick a story that focuses on one and give a great example of how our aid helped a family. It is easy to try and squeeze everything into one story, but unfortunately not helping our audience have a clear call to action.

For a holiday campaign, we focused on our luminAID solar lights. We highlighted the uses of them and how important lighting is after disaster or conflict. The campaign employed the following characteristics of Engagement:

Transparency — We were very clear that people could not donate specifically for a luminAID. Rather, donations will be directed towards the area of greatest need. We simply wanted to highlight one of our aid items that are incredibly innovative and life-saving.

Interactivity — We shared our social media links and encouraged people to share why they think light is important. We also posed the question of what aid would be most important following a disaster, encouraging our supporters to interact with us and our brand.

Immediacy — We created the campaign as an urgent holiday appeal; asking people to donate specifically over the holidays and also at the end of the tax year so they would be eligible for a tax receipt for that year. Donations that were made were used to stockpile aid for future disasters.

Facilitation — As described in The Dragonfly Effect, facilitation is “the company acts as a caretaker of brand development rather than attempting to control it.” For us, this isn’t a very applicable campaign characteristic as we do want to control our brand messaging.

Commitment — We are constantly committed to our donors as well as to families that we are helping around the world. We make that very clear in all of our messaging.

Collaboration — This holiday campaign sprung out of our relationship with luminAID, a company in the United States that ShelterBox has worked closely with over the years. They have created an amazing solution to lighting following disaster that ties in perfectly with our brand, hence our relationship and collaboration with them.

Experience — By highlighting specific stories of the solar lights in use in the field, our donors can see how their support will help families in need. The founders of luminAID went to Malawi to see how their lights have helped people and we have great content that showcases their work, which is then communicated to our supporters.

Trust — With the above characteristics, most important is to have trust with our supporters. We want them to trust us and know that we are taking their support and making a difference in someone’s life.

The characteristics of engagement are probably the highlight of The Draongfly Effect to me — they really encourage you think hard about your campaigns and how you are working towards engaging your supporters.

Next up…. turning that engagement into action!