Oxfam –

• Hostile environment
• Need to be fast to react and change
• Competing in a market with cruk, people have been touched by cancer, but not so likely to have been touched by extreme poverty
• Edgy our remarkable content
• “If we just did what people wanted we’d be a pet charity”
• Need to explain reality and relevance
• Everyone thinks their team is most important, comms have to make it coherent
• Capitalise on world events e.g. Panama papers
• People are the answer to the problem of poverty
• Personal stories
• Balance of authenticity versus appeal of celebrity support
• Media relationship with HuffPo
• They make films via animated PowerPoint presentations to save cash
• Celebrating user-generated content, you’re a movement that depends on people so don’t try to control them
• They have an internal digital advocates group to cement it across the organisation, a lot of these are senior
• Welcome the digital team to all meetings
• They also have a supporter marketing team who find out what people want to share and are agile enough to go and make it
• “Voice defined by brand work we commissioned and being driven by our values”
• “Accountability, inclusivity and empowerment”
• We are people, we talk like people

How do you justify investment in digital?

• ROI is an old metric applied to a new idea, it doesn’t work
• Econsultancy from 2013 have been saying this
• Value depends on your org and what you want to get from it – have a theory of communications that works for your organisation
• Designers play on people’s natural desire to connect, e.g. bandages on a teddy bear, old Macs look like a face
• Social media does this too
• Quality over quantity in your content
• Build your credibility so you have an opportunity to influence
• Blended approach to ugc, real stories, real people, high production value
• Measuring attitude change rather “than money for stuff”

Creating viral content, Missing People –

• Social media is perfect for them
• Can be locally targeted
• Also have an annual ‘big tweet’
• Their main aim isn’t fundraising, why it’s so successful
• Big storytelling element to their campaigns
• Education element on the different reasons someone might go missing
• Creates an organic online community, #teambigtweet was user-generated
• Q – how do you appeal to people who aren’t directly affected?
• They approach key influencers and celebrities to help it take off
• They manage the relationships really well through the year, to the point that celebrities now approach them asking when they can get involved
• Plan, plan, plan
• Foster a community, create a movement
• Live by your values
• Be real and human

Content creation –

• Write like you’re writing for a friend
• Be unpredictable
• How tos, Q&As
• Take risks, brave, bold, subversive
• Reddit
• Hijacking, e.g. Save the children #tubestrike
• Day in the life
• 70% valuable, interesting 20% sharing ugc, 10% asks
• Invest in high quality pics and videos
• Shock tactics
• Well positioned influencers e.g. a makeup vlogger producing a video for Refuge on how to look best the morning after
• NHS did a nice #tbt to the war centenary “thank goodness ambulances have improved since then”
• WWF did a great ‘last selfie’ campaign on Snapchat, capitalising on the countdown to extinction feature
• Use the language used by your audience

Make the most of every penny, BHF –

• Heart disease kills 3x more women than breast cancer
• There’s a big stigma in heart disease (lifestyle, etc)
• Keep it simple, comms job of making sure nothing comes out designed by committee
• “Don’t build it, they won’t come” digital from the ground up
• 65% video retention rate versus 46% copy
• Young graduates can transform your digital teams
• Be an evangelist for digital in your org
• MLK said he had a dream, not a plan – sell them the dream
• Understand your internal teams and what matters to them

Being data driven –

• Approach internal inspiration like an external comms strategy
• Hero something you know you can make progress on so you create yourself a case study
• Personalised site for members, tailored based on their data
• Content tailoring and personalisation for mom membership orgs

Breast cancer care, measurement and evaluation-

• With every digital strategy, it’s exciting, things are going to change
• You meet with everyone, talk to users, create personas and envision a better place
• Remember, everything you promise you must be able to deliver
• Friend “friends to digital” in your organisation
• Influence and inspire the people who aren’t yet ready
• “Every person affected by breast cancer will be able to get and give support”
• Everything in their strategy goes back to that
• Where are we now, where do we want to be
• Develop a matrix to measure this
• Set a timeline
• They developed a tool to measure digital transformation, now free to download (breastcancercare.org.uk/starwars)
• #digitalmaturitymatrix
• NCVO are looking at measuring digital skill across organisations
• Cross-check digital trends in strategy development

Audience segmentation, Which?

• They were surprised by people’s motivations, they care more about challenging nuisance calls than they do about politics
• Created personas
• Talk to your supporters
• Define their personality and motivation as well as giving them a name
• They ask a lot at sign-up, e.g. their internet provider, rail company etc, then when there’s a big data breach or rail scandal they can provide info and push content to those people
• Ditch enews, it doesn’t work, would you treat your friends this way?
• They do a lot of small scale message testing and social listening

Influencer marketing, 38 degrees –

• One minute of video is more powerful than one million words
• But it’s not about making a slick advert, it’s about telling a story
• New consumers of video are on mobile, they’ve got shorter attention spans, they watch it as they come across it, they’re not always searching for it
• It’s easy to overestimate the skill you need to create video content
• A perfect video every three days is more powerful than a perfect one every three months

Guide dogs for the blind –

• How they could maximise on dual screen habits
• Used tv accelerator to target audiences during peak shows
• Their organic stuff does better than paid, barring valuable media partnerships e.g. ITV

Youth sport trust –

•  Worked with future foundation to look at trends and predict the young sport landscape for 2035
• Wanted to reach a new audience and engage them in their work
• Used visual data, an interactive microsite and social media
• Asked kids what they thought PE would look like in 2035
• Got schools involved
• Used key stats to engage media “1 in 4 young people think playing a computer game counts as physical activity” (Didn’t say whether this included Wii/Kinect)
• Internal buy-in from the outset
• Give supporters previews of your campaigns
• Shout about your success internally
• Young people led
• Addressed issues like getting girls into sport
• Wanted to empower people with disabilities into sport and understand how inspiration could happen, via social media etc

Action for children –

• Barriers to internal engagement with digital – fear, understanding, status quo, money
• Be results focused, measure everything along the way
• Share success
• Inspire and engage internally
• Internal digital champions
• Use the language of the people you’re talking to or hoping to inspire
• Use agencies to plug your case, people often respect an external “expert” view, even if it’s the same as yours!
• Sell each win to get buy-in for the next thing

Future proofing –

• Keep an eye on the market and the potential to move into it
• Amplification
• User-generated stuff
• The public are an extension of your comms team
• VR
• Better use of data
• Welcome series’
• Supporter journey mapping
• Useful, shareable tools and content
• AI potential in the future for immune service provision and signposting
• Personalisation based content
• Google knowledge graph
• People want – capture everything, access everywhere, find things fast (Evernote)
• Privacy and data protection priorities
• Failure is good, creativity takes courage