Best E-Media Campaign

Howard Lake | 15 June 2007 | Blogs

For the campaign that demonstrates the best use of either one single form of e-media or the successful application of a range of techniques to acquire, renew or upgrade donors. Applications might demonstrate the use of blogs, websites, viral marketing and podcasts, mobile phone technology and digital TV.
The shortlisted entries are (in alphabetical order):
Cows ‘n’ Things – Help the Aged
This project was to develop a new online microsite to complement the new Cows ‘n’ Things offline ethical giving catalogue. The microsite built on Help the Aged brand and values, and offers an “entertaining experience” for visitors to enjoy and encourages them to donate online. The tone of the site had to be fun, funky and fresh, but retain a serious message about disadvantaged older people. It aimed to grow income streams and attract new audiences.
The site was supported by an integrated marketing campaign across all target audience touchpoints, launched in October for the holiday season.  E-media was an appropriate medium because NFP research has shown that charities are achieving more and more internet donations and attracting new donors. This particular campaign lent itself to e-media because of its fun and quirky imagery.
There were no existing benchmarks that could be used for forecasting, but the budget was set at 1,000 orders at an average of £20 per order, giving an income off £20,000. RoI was projected at 3.6. Actual results were 2,078 orders averaging £26.90, which gave an income of £55,904, with an RoI of 5.6.
Shelter Christmas Campaign by online marketing agency Harvest Digital
The campaign was set up to test a range of online media and Christmas themed creative to generate income; to generate £55,400 in the first year, to deliver 14,888,000 impressions of Shelter advertising and to acquire new Shelter campaigners. The campaign ran from November up to Christmas Day and used Google and MSN paid search, banner activity (cost per impression, cost per click, cost per acquisition), subsites, and affiliate marketing through buy.at.
Two creatives were produced called ‘Heading home for Christmas’ and ‘Perfect Christmas gift’ designed to encourage people to remember those who do not have a decent home to celebrate in. The online activity was designed to promote an instant reaction and people could click straight through to a landing page where they could set up a regular or one-off payment.
The campaign was measured by RoI, projected to be 1.5, and sign-ups. The campaign raised £62,609 in year one with an overall RoI of 1.93. Almost 1,000 people signed up to be campaigners. The ‘Heading Home for Christmas’ creative performed particularly well and was especially effective with a younger audience.
Work Place Giving
In October 2005 PFO Workplace Giving UK launched an online ‘DONATE NOW’ facility to recruit payroll giving donations through its website. It wanted to offer its corporate clients an alternative to physical promotions of their scheme via an online solution; offer employees an online facility to enable them to take part in the scheme easily; offer charity clients a new revenue stream through online payroll giving; and offer a solution to those organisations where physical visits were not permitted.
Employees only take part in payroll giving if the process of signing up is really easy and if the scheme is taken to them in a proactive way. If the company is unable to speak to employees, it believed that providing an online option would get over these workplace access issues.
Workplace Giving UK developed an ‘online’ pack, which was made available to all companies it works with. This contained an intranet banner, posters, wage slip messages to advertise the online facility; draft launch or relaunch email for the company to send to staff and an article for a magazine or intranet. Employees were engaged via email, competitions and news items.
The company projected that it would recruit an average of 10 online donors a week in the first 18 months and that the average gift would be £5 a month. Actual results were 22 donors a week with an average monthly gift of £15.02, with 185 employers having staff donate through the site. All of these donations are tax-effective as payroll giving deductions are made from gross pay.

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.