Charity comms – creating great content

Top tips for content success:

  • Know your audience
  • Know what they like
  • Know what shared interests they have with each other
  • Know how they consume content
  • Fulfill your election promise
  • User-generated stuff
  • No-one cares about your internal successes
  • Personalisation of content, rspb member’s area gives them bespoke videos and tips
  • Revival of podcasts
  • Make your content actionable
  • Measure loyalty in a way that works for your campaign
  • One size doesn’t fit all
  • Audience insights, including surveys
  • Also contact people who are doing what you do and learn from them
  • Lovely video from Future Leaders on recruiting heads to schools

Immersive content, RNLI:

  • Use immersive content to bring what they do to a wider audience
  • Have a strategic set of content principles
  • Use hard hitting content to teach young men what happens when you’re drowning, they’re statistically most likely to get into trouble in water
  • They have a challenge that everyone wants to get on the boats, they’re trialling Google Cardboard to give people a simulated experience
  • Developed an app to give people a virtual tour
  • They’re also creating their own versions for schools
  • Flikr have just started doing 360 photos
  • They use GoPro for 360 videos
  • They also get their supporters to help, a lot of video skill there
  • Check out Cancer Research 360 lab tool

Social media platforms:

  • Seen a movement to smaller platforms
  • Use bigger channels for paid reach
  • Don’t start anything you can’t commit to
  • Is it relevant for your brand, what do you want it for, how will you measure success
  • Instagram:
  • 40% of Instagram audience are under 24
  • Quality over quantity
  • High dwell time, high engagement
  • Dogs Trust an example of good practice
  • National Trust also great, embrace user-generated stuff
  • Look at the friends of your followers and be like them
  • Is your brand flexible enough to communicate variety
  • LinkedIn:
  • Content lasts longer
  • Pulse is a useful way to connect with people working on similar things
  • YouTube:
  • Most visits in the world compared to all other social channels
  • Video content has a great cpc rate
  • Cancer Research example of great video content
  • They create useful hygiene content “how does breast cancer develop” etc
  • Look at YouTube playbook for how to produce great content
  • Learn from successful vloggers
  • Thumbnails matter
  • Pinterest:
  • “If you don’t work with women, don’t be on Pinterest”
  • Life stage platform – birthdays, weddings, parties, etc
  • Oxfam a great example, help users live their mission “Love your leftovers” etc
  • Vine:
  • Jokes and pranks = bulk of content, but also great for education, how to content, etc
  • Peach:
  • Great for gifs and getting user feedback
  • Not all platforms have to be massive, quality over quantity
  • Sue Ryder did a nice “send a tweet to someone who’s been there for you” curation idea, shared all the texts in a nice video and then did a “can you send one more text” fundraising cta on the back of the day’s buzz
  • Amplification
  • Keep an eye on Reddit, find things on their way up
  • “Stock up” free stock image tool
  • “Manage flitter” bulk unfollow tool

Testing:

  • “Be careful with sentiment analysis, we’re painfully sarcastic in the UK”
  • Social capital – what would someone sharing this content say about them to their friends
  • Don’t cut corners, test each change individually
  • Readability testing e.g. readability-score.com
  • serplab – informs on ranking position per term
  • usertesting.com – expensive subscription but you can pay per test. You set tasks and it records users completing them
  • They also use survey monkey for user testing
  • Google consumer surveys – very cheap! Ask one question at a time so you don’t impact ux too negatively
  • Crazyegg – heat mapping and scroll testing
  • Evidence is vital for internal culture change
  • WhatTestWon – shares results of tests other brands have done

User-generated content:

  • Mencap #hearmyvoice
  • Had a very stat based campaign that wasn’t cutting through
  • They created a microsite for people to share their stories, connected to engaging networks so people could email their MP from the site
  • Created a sub brand for it, giving it its own identity
  • Pulled out snippets for social media images
  • Really visual campaign, great for Instagram
  • Also gained content from friends and families too, widened the experiences they could share
  • Serialised the key issues “health month” “transport month” “education month” They tied these to calendar hooks e.g. back to school
  • Made sure to capture offline content and enabling community involvement for those who weren’t digitally active
  • Site allowed MPs to pledge their support for the campaign
  • This boosted the ugc coming in, felt it was having an impact
  • Had an interactive map of where conversations were happening

Safeguarding and consent, Children’s Society:

  • They have a strong church connection, didn’t know that!
  • Parents are happy for their kids to be photographed if they believe in the cause
  • They drew up a consent policy for photo sharing featuring people’s children

Campaign success with storytelling, Women for Refugee Women:

  • #setherfree campaign
  • Crowd sourced their whole campaign with focus groups of refugee women on what they thought were the biggest issues
  • Shared stories about those women
  • Used calendar hooks e.g. international women’s day
  • Created an online gallery of “selfie with board” photos
  • Branded campaign “99 women” about those detained whilst pregnant
  • Facilitated the campaign presentation to Teresa May
  • Celebrity and PR support
  • Maintain close relationships with the 99 women for future campaign consultation

The importance of tone of voice, WaterAid:

  • They create once, publish everywhere
  • Single issue means they can be really creative
  • Objective, strategy, tactics before they do anything
  • Audience motivation, find out what’s stopped them taking action before
  • Focus on the people you know you can influence to take action and build from there
  • They “tribe” their audiences (Guardian readers, X factor viewers, etc) and create mood boards reflecting those people’s interests
  • They reference back to the boards when creating content
  • Helps them be more objective “I don’t like it, but this tribe will”
  • Do placement stuff in the places those people like to be
  • #ifmenhadperiods
  • Thought about how they could challenge taboos around periods and toilets, started internally e.g. women in the office putting tampons up their sleeves
  • Gave them a relatable news hook
  • They didn’t want to alienate men so were careful with messaging
  • Manpons film = hilarious, funny for both gendersCreate contrasts between developing and developed world situations, but also highlighted the shared situations e.g. meeting your baby for the first time
  • Compared maternity bags from London to Tanzania
  • Took people from call the midwife out to Tanzania – linked the programme that section of their audience liked to the cause in a really immersive way
  • Created interactive contrast content between the two countries on their site – the user switches between two simultaneously playing videos of women in each country having a baby
  • Raised £5m
  • 30m FB reach