The 6 most wonderful wins this Christmas
I’m Gavin Williams, Digital Business Partner at the NSPCC and we’re walking in a digital win…ter wonderland.
’Tis the season to be jolly; ’tis the season that encompasses half the year. If you work for a charity, it can feel like Christmas is constantly on the horizon. On hot summer days you’ll be planning your Christmas marketing campaigns and by the time autumn comes around Christmas feels more like a permanent state of being than a season.
At the NSPCC, we go crackers for Christmas. From our established Letter From Santa product to our brand new event Get Your Sparkle On, via our Christmas donation appeal and festive online shop, we stuffed more into Christmas 2018 than ever before.
So here are our top 6 digital ‘wins’ (or, in old money, ‘successes’)this Christmas.
- Helping Santa send letters to thousands of children
Letter From Santa is one of our major fundraising products. In exchange for a suggested donation, our dedicated microsite allows parents (or anyone else) to order a personalised letter from Santa to a child in their life.
Something that brought us Christmas cheer this year was affiliate marketing (we’re nerds). With our media agency, we set up an affiliate campaign which allowed us to pay for our media on a performance-based outcome — paying each affiliates back a set percentage of the revenue that was generated from the letter orders they drove.
This gave us an excellent return on investment, and as part of our marketing channel mix has been amongst the top performers for cost-efficiency. We’re now looking at other propositions where we can use affiliate marketing effectively in future campaigns.
And if that affiliate marketing chat didn’t warm the cockles of your heart, then hopefully this will: So far 177,646 letters have been ordered from Santa and his elves, helping to make Christmas magical for children across the UK and beyond.
Forgive us for adding to your workload Santa?
2. A cat got involved with Christmas
A cat! With a letter from Santa! Just look at his little grinchy face.
3. Launching Get Your Sparkle On
The concept is simple: we’ve been asking groups of friends, colleagues and relatives to get together, add some sparkle to their Christmas party (by wearing glittery clothes and sparkly make-up, for example) and texting to donate.
The idea was to launch this as a sprint project — to test and to learn. We worked across teams — particularly events, digital and our creative studio — to create some awesome content, test messaging and get a sense of what demographics responded to the campaign.
We saw that women were signing up to do the event with their friends — but not so many women with children, so we stopped targeting this audience. Retargeting people on Facebook who have converted on our past campaigns also worked well in generating sign ups. After about a week of the campaign, we also changed the messaging on our social ads and website to explain more clearly what the event is and to emphasise that people get a free fundraising pack if they sign up. This saw an increase in sign ups and, with paid media, we drove a more efficient cost per acquisition week by week by applying what we learned.
4. We sold a lot of jumpers
This year our celebrity supporter Samantha Faiers gave us the gift of a special ‘Sparkle On’ jumper she designed herself. With her help, we sold it on our online shop — with the money raised helping us protect more children.
In the first week we sold half the jumpers we had in stock — thanks mostly to posts Samantha made on her social media channels. We also sent people who had ordered a Letter from Santa a tailored email about the ‘Sparkle On’ jumper. This performed well and saw an open rate to rival a stack of presents on Christmas morn.
5. Repurposing video content
An appeal video is for life, not just for Christmas.
So we needed to deliver a fundraising asset using pre-existing film footage, that could be used for fundraising throughout the year and could also work this Christmas to encourage supporters to donate. Not an easy task!
Using this brief, we took a couple of 3 minute service films and edited these for fundraising purposes for our Christmas Appeal.
- We simplified the original edits, bringing forward the emotive strengths.
- We concentrated on the core message as we thought this was more engaging and could drive the viewer to donate online.
- As Facebook would be our main marketing channel for acquiring a cold audience, we formatted the video to work on Facebook (4:5 vertical format), simplified the subtitles and made sure the first 10 seconds were really strong to work for news feeds.
Whilst we won’t have a final view on results until after Christmas, we already know that it has been our best performing paid recruitment activity on Facebook to date, both in terms of volume of donations and cost-efficiency. It also meant we saved the cost of producing a new video asset.
6. Organic social success
Just like with your Christmas dinner, sometimes you can’t beat a bit of organic when it comes to digital channels.
This year, to promote Get Your Sparkle On, we posted an Instagram grid takeover. We haven’t done this before and it meant we upped our Instagram feed posts from 3 times a week to 9 times in a day, so it was definitely a bit of a test.
But this isn’t called the most wonderful time of the year for nothing: we saw a high engagement rate and many supporters clicked onto our profile to find out more. It was a great way to build awareness of our new event.
2018 was also the first year we’ve featured an advent calendar on our organic social channels. Incorporating all our different fundraising and cause-led Christmas propositions, we posted the jingly, baubly assets on Twitter and Instagram every day. Featuring playlists, celebrity content and festive giveaways, this strategy saw fantastic engagement.
Our social media also lit up when we posted about various landmarks like the London Eye, themselves lit up in green to promote the NSPCC. This helped us reach a wider audience, with the post outperforming our usual benchmark in terms of impressions.
7. Elton John was at our Christmas party.
For real.
And so with wrapping paper scattered on the floor, that’s it for Christmas — at least as far as this blog is concerned. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from NSPCC Digital!
