Transcript: Ask the Consider Experts – The Secrets of Christmas Appeals
Webinar Metadata & Participant Profiles
- Moderator – Ian Consider
- Panellist – Tom Travell, British Red Cross
- Panellist – Charlotte Moyles, Crisis
- Panellist – Ben Brill, Consider
- Panellist – Megan Ashdown, The Kite Factory
Full transcript
Section 1: The Evolution Of Christmas Appeals
Ian: thank you for joining us this morning i think I speak for us all on the call when I say we’re very grateful you sharing your time and also your views and opinions right let’s get stuck into talking about the evolution of Christmas appeals i’d like to start by reflecting on the fact that for decades the British Red Cross in crisis have been famous for their winter appeals on the one hand you’ve got British Red Cross whose incentive fundraising most people here will have received in some form indeed a lot of it came from our studio consider uh coasters Christmas cards wrapping paper the snowman partnership you name the incentive the Red Cross tested it and I I’m pretty sure I won’t be the only one uh here today who’s got a Red Cross pen hanging around in the drawer um and then you have Crisis crisis at Christmas born in 1967 and with the launch of their reserve of place proposition in 2009 it’s clear that festive fundraising is firmly in their DNA but in recent years both BRC and Crisis have evolved moving away from this tried and tested more traditional Christmas fundraising and seen huge success in the process
Ian: so what’s going on Tom i’m going to come to you first you’re welcome um give us the inside track here how how has the British Red Cross evolved its Christmas fundraising in recent years and and what came after that incentiveled approach that you were so famous for why was that
Tom: yeah I think um to start with the why I think is is there there are a couple of things in it so one um there certainly our sort of environmental approach um you know we were stuffing ever more incentives into into packs and and we really wanted to sort of you know minimize the environmental impact on that side and that that that’s one of the drivers but also um and I’m sure many people have seen this you know seeing declining returns from that approach as well um um so we really wanted to change that approach to be more about building connection and loyalty with people rather than using that sort of uh that incentivized approach to to which was often delivering us maybe some really good response rates but um at very low value and and really you know maybe people not connecting really with the Red Cross and supporting us again in future
Tom: so um that was that was why we wanted to change and I guess we replaced that uh with two two big things two two sort of things I talk about one is one is a real shift in our tone of voice and that’s something that’s really changed in um in our fundraising over the over the last few years um I I wouldn’t credit myself with that i think um Rebecca Shaw in our team and Pali Mall’s recently recently left u really driven the charge on that and and one of the one of the things we do is really just look at like what what realities are facing our teams out in the field you know what what’s happening to British Red Cross’s work and what what are the needs that we have an or as an organization and trying to really bring that through to our supporters um also wanting to be more reactive and relevant to what’s going on in the external environment so not sort of planning and setting exactly what we’re going to talk about 10 months in advance but having a process where we’re able to do that as late as possible so we’re really talking about what’s going on in in our supporters worlds as well and what they’re seeing in the news and what they’re interested in um and that’s that’s been really important
Section 2: Creative Strategy And Authenticity
Ian: Ben just to come back to Tom’s point about bringing in the emotional connection you you’ve led Chris uh creative development for several of British Red Cross’s new look winter appeals in your opinion what does that approach what does the approach with those appeals mean for the charity sector
Ben: all right um I’m probably going to echo quite a lot of what Tom has just said but um firstly I think one of the key things for me about the way that we’ve worked with the British Red Cross over the past couple of years is that it’s really demonstrated what a “proper partnership” can achieve when you work together um we’ve worked with Tom and the team on a bunch of different projects over the past couple of years and that’s given us the chance to chat to loads of people within the British Red Cross that’s helped us to get under the skin of the way that they do things and all of the different challenges that they face and I cannot stress this enough very often it’s the chats that you have with the clients or with the ops person over at coffee that ends up unlocking a real nugget that shows through in the creative
Ben: um in terms of other lessons for the sector um I think as Tom mentioned the “clarity of ask” is super super important um at the start of every project that we work on with Tom and the team we’ve got a really clear idea of why we need to be asking for money right now and the thing is that’s often much pointier than it’s Christmas and we always ask for money at Christmas that might sound quite obvious but it’s also quite rare and I think really delving into that and understanding this year the impact that rising costs were having on the charity’s ability to operate it gave the appeal the real power
Ben: um to Tom’s point about capturing tone of voice i think there’s a couple of things there as well the first is the importance of “authenticity” and this particularly applies to things like DM where we’ve worked really hard to capture the voice of a real person um in the war mailing last year we had the head of ops talking about the stuff that was keeping them awake at night i think that showed a real vulnerability and we really by re really leaning into that I think it created something that felt quite special i think finally and kind of related to that just having a bit of a license to break or at least to bend some of the established rules of direct mail um really helps you to capture that authenticity so this feels less like a set of tried and tested techniques that fit to a template and more like a letter from a real person with a real kind of hintterland and real real concerns as well um I think sort of summing it all up it really does boil down to one thing and that’s just being honest about why you need the money and framing that in as human and authentic a way as possible
Section 3: Case Study – Crisis And ‘Life Beyond Homelessness’
Ian: Charlotte can I bring you in maybe to comment on some of that some of those points Ben was saying i’ I’d imagine you’ve got something to say but specifically to frame it what came after reserve a place why did why did crisis make that shift at Christmas um and have you learned similar things for example
Charlotte: yeah there were a couple of reasons why we moved away from reserve a place so it all started off with COVID um our traditional model was very much day centers and people were reserving a place um for someone to have Christmas lunch um along with lots of good stuff with the charity lots of advisers that’s moved on to more of a hotel model now so um and we see a much bigger impact on our members by bringing them in somewhere safe for a minimum of three weeks the hotels run between three and five weeks um we see much better outcomes for our members so it’s moved away a little bit from that reserve a place day center um and our uh new model is to bring them in and then work with a lot of our advisers um to get them on a plan out of homelessness for good
Charlotte: um because of that we moved away from reserve a place to more um to a different proposition um one of the big things that we knew made crisis unique is the unique price point people are used to seeing £28 something or £29 something from crisis um that’s calculated based on how much it cost to help one person out of homelessness for good that pricing switched um away from just Christmas to more of a year round support um price point so we’re talking about how we can help people on their journey out of homelessness um referring to Ben’s point about the emotional connection that was really important from us we know that a lot of people like crisis because they’re one-to-one model um and they like to pay for one person or multiple people to receive help at Christmas so we knew that keeping storytelling at the heart of our campaign and keeping our price point and being really tangible about what that price point’s going to provide someone would be really important um so that’s how we’ve kind of ended up with “Life Beyond Homelessness” our proposition um and fundraising we talk about the first day so the first day that someone receives support at Christmas um and then where it goes from there
Section 4: Media Evolution And Econometric Modelling
Ian: Megan you you and Charlotte working together on a lot of this um from a media perspective though how have you seen Christmas fundraising evolve
Megan: yeah absolutely so I think a key thing that we’ve definitely had over the past few years is the use of econometric modelling and how that’s implemented on media planning um so obviously it sort of is a fantastic way to prove sort of real worth and attribution methods of different channels and what we’ve definitely seen is that digital is a really key player in Christmas campaigns and will be moving forwards like I’m very much a digital person but I am going to say digital is growing and always will be um so it is something that’s really crucial to sort of ensure that you’re looking at moving forwards and something we’ve really been working on with crisis in terms of integrating planning so you know we’ve got a fantastic offline team a fantastic AV team a digital team and we all work together to make sure that this campaign is hitting those points in line with econometric modelling as much as possible um and that’s something we’ve developed um really closely with Crisis over the past few years sort of in line with that as well was making sure things like owned, earned, shared and paid are a really core part of our strategy so making sure that we’re leveraging points from things that are happening in the outside world
Ian: is there any do you want to expand a little bit on econometric modelling Megan that’d be helpful
Megan: yeah absolutely um so econometric modelling um is very it’s a essentially a maths modelling based attribution system so what we can do is you take things like baselines um and sort of media output competitor activity it all gets put into a big model um and essentially what it comes out is the sort of the attributed real value of different media channels so for example we all know that PPC comes out fantastically on all performance because it’s last click it’s you know it’s taking off basically all your above the line people go and then search for example for crisis but actually they’ve seen a TV ad they’ve seen this ad they’ve seen that ad it’s not essentially always an attributable fair to PPC what econometrics would do for example in this situation it would say okay well the actual real value of PPC is this because actually you’re not attributing anything to out of home which had this impact or this impact so this is a very much a sort of the econometrics team will do this in far more detail but that’s sort of my understanding of it is that’s how it would work it’s a real attribution system for your channels that you can’t necessarily measure in other ways
Section 5: Innovation, Ai, And New Channels
Ian: when it comes to digital tools and channels what innovations have proved most effective
Megan: something that we’re seeing increasingly prevalent in terms of innovation is that machine learning piece um so last year for example we were testing things like Advantage Plus audiences on Facebook Performance Max AI-driven tools on display and actually what we saw is these are working really well now um I think um some people can be a bit skeptical because sometimes Facebook or Google can push things and you don’t know whether that’s right for your campaigns but we sort of especially with Advantage Plus on Facebook which is really quite a broad audience that you can put in there and you really sort of let the machine and the algorithms do the work in terms of like finding those people it really comes out with fantastic results that we saw last year the same with Performance Max we saw really really strong results on Google from that
Ian: Tom how does what Megan has said sit with you from your your side is British Red Cross having these discussions around evolving digital tools not necessarily just machine learning and h how have you built innovation in a wider sense perhaps into your winter appeals
Tom: yeah thank you i think um certainly we’ve been um triing some of the the AI tools as well um similar ones that you you mentioned Megan the Advantage Plus and and PMAX i think we’ve seen some good uh initial signs from them um our digital fundraising team are fantastic in looking out at what opportunities there are and where we can push and test and and drive performance um so that’s something we’re kind of doing all year round but certainly did towards the end of last year and at Christmas as well um and and I think in that line we we test new channels as well and have tested new channels at Christmas um but also uh we’ve gone out with new products and new creative
Tom: I I think what we’ve what we try to do when we’ve done it best is um try things before Christmas right so can we get a test out uh is there a live test we can do if there isn’t a live test are there any tools that we can use um to to get some initial insight so we might use YouGov surveys or uh Vox PopMe um uh which is a a great tool where you can send something to people and they’ll do a quick five minute video giving you their reflections you can choose the audience one of the things we’ve done to derisk that I’d say is really focusing on an audience that isn’t our core um fundraising audience at Christmas where we’re bringing a new product forward so for example last year we launched our um redeemable gift card in stores in Tesco nationwide um and um that was really um looking to uh connect with the um with a with a younger audience much more interested in sustainable fashion and and gifting essentially and um not really overlapping with our core audience
Ian: Charlotte speaking of gifting um we’ve already mentioned um Christmas stocking slightly but it comes to mind obviously as a winning innovation from recent times of crisis could you tell us a bit more about it
Charlotte: yeah absolutely really similar to Tom we’re often testing um new products and new um technology and stuff early on um for the buildup to Christmas from the leadup um we have a fantastic innovation team here at Crisis um and two years ago they tested this new “Christmas Stocking” product so the idea was that we wanted to have those lower price points to go out to people that was still stackable we see a lot of people liking to put multiple price points or gifts together cat something for slightly younger audience um so kind of hitting that young family 35 to 55 age bracket and yeah we put it out to test see if it was a “minimum viable product” and it performed really really well people loved it it was kind of a gamified product so it was looking a bit more our digital and tech um and making it a slightly different way to gift not only gift but give as well on the confirmation email we’ve got like a fun certificate that people can put in a real stocking for their children
Section 6: Tiktok And Native Content
Ian: have you used Tik Tok for fundraising asks at Christmas
Charlotte: yeah sure so yeah we uh tested Tik Tok for the first time last year it performed much much better this year it shows real promise for stocking um a challenge for us is getting the content right um you can’t just kind of use your meta ads and hope that they’re going to work on Tik Tok it needs to be much more organic um in its production it needs to um yeah it just needs to be right for the platform so one particular ad that did really really well for us was with one of our celebrity ambassadors Will Poulter um who had a day at our warehouse he was helping to pack things so it worked perfectly for our stocking ask um and our organic social team went and filmed some content just on their phones to make it look really sort of native to the platform um and that performed really well
Megan: the less polished you look is sometimes the better because people want authenticity they want to feel like they’re not watching an ad on Tik Tok something that we see time and time again is that the fatigue on Tik Tok is also really quick so it’s very very trend driven in a way that other social channels aren’t so you can put a video on Tik Tok and within 2 weeks you’re likely going to have seen a downward trajectory in terms of reactions video views etc a big one that we’re watching is connected TV in line with YouTube that’s really growing there’s things like Amazon Prime Netflix they’re sort of growing these subscription services as well that can be bought programmatically and actually that’s a really big space in terms of people who are becoming unplugged from linear TV
Section 7: Predictions For Christmas 2024
Ian: Charlotte I’ll start with you if I may um over the past few years homelessness as a cause has become more and more political right and crisis has become more and more outspoken um do you think how do you think that the looming general election might influence your Christmas campaign
Charlotte: well for us we know that the election will probably be happening this autumn it will almost undoubtedly overlap with the Christmas campaign and that provides real opportunity for us um we also uh had the opportunity this year to jump off the back of a small political moment when Suella Braverman um talked about her views of homelessness we we couldn’t remain silent as a homelessness sector we all spoke up um and we got a very quick reactive ad out within about a day um talking about um how homelessness is not a lifestyle choice that ad performed brilliantly i think it was our top performing ad of November um and we know that a large set of our audience really care about the those political views and us speaking up
Ian: Ben please what what do you think the biggest influences will be on fundraising at Christmas this year
Ben: yeah I think um as Charlotte says I think it’s just being about super aware of where your audience is at right now and also I guess how tired they probably are um potential change in UK government um that might lead to an “optimism bounce” i certainly hope it does but we must also be aware of “crisis fatigue” difficult times do also present other opportunities too um we’ve learned in previous recessions that while many people are struggling not everybody is and there’s almost a compulsion to be more generous if you’re one of the ones who’s coming out of it quite well
Ian: Tom point from you please if if that’s okay
Tom: we have really shortened our deadlines or our time between confirming what the like you know our print deadlines for example so we’ve we’ve really shortened when we sign off final copy and creative to when it gets printed across a range of um you know things that we we put out there from our mailings our door drops etc um and we’ve worked hard with our suppliers to do that we’re all on board with the fact that the the thing we’re trying to do is be the most relevant um and if something else happens that means we need to change we all understand that’s why we’re changing
Megan: we’re really focusing in on the depreciation of cookies and this is something that is going to be affecting pretty much everything in the marketing landscape Google’s been threatening to do it for quite a while it’s now we are now planning for it to be this year it’s actually going to have a marked impact on all campaigns even if you’re doing things like measuring your TV vitalizer we’re looking at cookieless solutions we’re looking at measurement alternatives and then other things that we’re looking at is also like general cost inflation
Section 8: Audience Q&A Sessions
Internal Messaging & Team Cohesion
Charlotte: we have a central proposition the life beyond homelessness um and we build a big tool we work with our creative agencies to have a toolkit imagery messaging um that goes out to the whole organization so that we’re aligned across fundraising but also volunteering campaigns uh retail all those kind of touch points Tom: I’d say it’s still an evolution for us brand and fundraising working together to to work on that sort of overarching um message if you like we tend to uh work in a working group that pulls in the key um heads from different um uh different our different areas of fundraising and different teams to work together
Advice for Smaller Charities
Ben: I think it’s essentially a brand challenge isn’t it what is the thing that you’re doing that nobody else is doing getting to the heart of what is either the “unique tragedy” of your cause or what is the “unique promise” of your cause Megan: be really specific about your audience if you are a smaller charity and you’ve not got as much to play with as larger charities going broad might not be the best thing for you be really specific about what audiences are on what channels
The “Hero Story” vs. Operational Truth
Tom: we don’t necessarily have one hero story across our campaigns i think what we where we start is is often from what’s what’s the operational truth and what’s the need for the Red Cross at this time last year for example we had um we had uh a real focus on how the impact of the cost of living was really impacting our ability to deliver our services so um we had an appeal from our Chief Finance Officer but at the same time in other creative we did have then a more of a personal human story of like someone who’s being impacted by the cost of living Ben: one thing that I’ve sometimes found though is that is by looking at the smaller stories that you can start to identify the themes that will help you bring the big story to life
2023 Results and Recession Targets
Charlotte: year on year our target tends to remain the same for the first two Christmases there was minus 7% this year it’s minus three so we’re getting really close to stemming that through the product diversification that’s through audience diversifications Tom: results were were very good for us in September there were um there was a large earthquake in Morocco and then uh the flooding in Libya where we responded and had large emergency appeals and then we went into uh sort of October and you know continue with a with a huge crisis in the Middle East that we’re you know really strongly associated with so um it’s a somewhat unique to the Red Cross and that has had a big impact
Channel Selection (The “Three Channel” Challenge)
Megan: I don’t think I’d want to do it across only three channels i guess it depends what you’re looking for if you’re looking at below the line you’re you’re going to be looking at digital channels right because at the moment those are the ones that you can attribute but massive caveats if you run a PPC on campaign on its own you’re not going to see it perform as well because the awareness isn’t being built elsewhere for people to know to search for you I can’t in good conscience say only run three
Inclusivity and In-Memory (In Mem) Supporters
Charlotte: we know that contextual ads work particularly well so if you want to diversify away from Christmas and reach other groups think about what other moments throughout the calendar year you can capitalize on Tom: I think one of the things uh is really just about understanding the audiences that you want to engage so you know finding ways to to reach out and speak to um the different audiences Megan: for In Mem the key thing there is probably just keeping it consistent with look feel making sure that the brand is really front and center and they know that it’s still coming from you Charlotte: I support in in mem for a family member and when it’s done well it’s done really really well and a lot of those people very much want to give to those causes um that have been part of that journey
Closing Remarks
Ian: and I think that is where we’ll leave it um a huge thank you to you all on the panel for such a great and insightful discussion today there’s a lot to take away and it’s really been my pleasure to listen to you all um and also a big thank you to you all for taking the time uh to join the conversation today we’ll follow up with a link to the recording of today’s session and if you’ve got a sec please do leave feedback on that screen that comes up next when the Zoom call ends we’d all love to know your thoughts any other questions please do drop me a line otherwise we will see you next time bye-bye for now