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