How to launch a successful charity campaign
As an award-winning charity campaign agency, we like to think we know a thing or two about creating scroll-stopping, action-inspiring and heart-winning campaigns.
Our experience has taught us that a successful strategic approach and creative concepts for charity campaigns depend on three key things. Read on to find out what they are…
1) Audience first
When planning an integrated marketing campaign, always start at the end. Ask yourself:
Who is this campaign for?
How will they be interacting with or seeing this campaign?
What do they want and need to see from you?
What’s your short-and long-term goal from them?
2) Strong campaign positioning and messaging
Everyone loves an ideation session – but without the right verbal grounding, sparkling visual ideas can have very shallow roots. Sometimes this only appears down the line, when you find the campaign idea doesn’t have sufficient depth to do what you need.
Define your campaign messaging first, so you have a central ‘compass’ and can make sure all your lovely, creative visual ideas are aligned.
3) One clear ask
It can be tempting, when developing a campaign narrative, to kill many birds with one campaign: speak to every audience, cover all of your services, appease every stakeholder.
But the more you broaden your ask, the weaker your campaign will become. Usually, it’s best to pick one objective, and do it well.
Lark tip: Don’t drop it
Lark director Paul is fond of talking about oranges. Specifically, the analogy that if you throw someone one orange, they’ll catch it - but if you throw them 10, they’ll drop them all.
Simplicity is almost always king. Over-complication, whether that’s too many asks in the campaign proposition, or too ‘clever’ a visual idea, is usually a fast-track to underwhelming outcomes.
Campaign spotlight
When Wellbeing of Women asked us to help create their campaign, there were lots (and lots!) of territories: access to information, normalisation and dismissal of pain, diagnosis delays, period poverty and stigma. They’re all comfortably in the charity’s wheelhouse - but far too many oranges to catch.
We worked with the team on a cross-channel campaign strategy that honed in on the dismissal of pain, producing a suite of case study-led digital campaign assets, including static and video, to run across paid and organic social, web and email.
The campaign went on to smash all the charity’s targets and even won Communications Campaign of Year at the Third Sector Awards.
Campaigns in action
Lark has created successful campaigns for a range of different charities and organisations, with different asks for different audiences.
Explore the links below to see the full case studies.
-
Living with Dementia: Dementia UK
A brand awareness campaign aimed at people caring for loved ones with dementia.
See full project -
Your Greatest Gift: Bowel Cancer UK
Bringing warmth, hope and inspiration to a legacy giving campaign.
See full project -
Not your sister: Target Ovarian Cancer
A fundraising and educational campaign to save women’s lives.
See full project
More campaign examples
Looking for more successful, purpose-led advertising examples? See below to find out about our processes and results.
-
Feel Good Book Club: Samaritans
We worked with Samaritans to create a range of new insight-led products, including the Feel Good Book Club.
One of the most valuable aspects of the book club was that 90% of members were new to the charity, so Samaritans were able to successfully cross-promote other fundraising and supporter engagement programmes to a brand new audience.
-
Hospital Fundraiser: PDSA
Animal charity PDSA asked Lark to help them raise £2.4 million for a replacement hospital for Manchester’s pets. We led on producing the persuasive concept and creative for the campaign, and outlined the narrative and a comms plan, moving from UGC story gathering to fundraising milestone ‘Thank You’ comms.
It worked! PDSA raised all the money they needed to built a new Manchester Pet Wellbeing Hospital.