Case study: Multi-channel holiday campaign for American Red Cross achieves 11:1 ROI

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1 Case study: Multi-channel holiday campaign for American Red Cross achieves 11:1 ROI The challenge The American Red Cross (ARC) entered the fourth quarter of 2009 with a funding deficit. Their efforts to close the income gap had been hindered by lower than anticipated disaster giving due to a lack of major top news story disasters and the country s economic crisis. As their agency partner, we knew we had to capture a greater share of holiday and year-end giving in order to meet their annual budget goal. The key challenge: Most donors think of the Red Cross as the organization to support when a major disaster hits. Few would associate the holidays with giving to the Red Cross. And we d be competing for share of mind and wallet against other well-established charity campaigns that have become holiday traditions. Moreover, the Red Cross had not yet found a truly effective fundraising platform outside of disasters. Even loyal donors do not realize that the Red Cross helps people in urgent need every single day, in communities all across the country. The Red Cross provides more than half of the nation s blood supply, comes to the aid of tens of thousands of victims of house fires and responds to thousands of local and regional emergencies every year. Yet ARC income is highly dependent on major disaster giving. We needed to test an entirely new approach to fundraising in order to gain share of holiday and year-end giving. That approach needed to communicate why a gift to the Red Cross is urgently needed at any time, not just during high-profile disasters. And we had to work fast. We began planning the strategy, creative and media in mid- September for a Thanksgiving launch. Objectives 1. Generate incremental income to help close the deficit gap 2. Increase ARC share of holiday/year-end donations 3. Make a compelling case for the urgency of giving to the Red Cross in a non-disaster context 4. Increase brand awareness and intention to give 5. Drive the majority of donors online to donate Russ Reid solution Our overarching strategy was to create a surround sound effect in the marketplace during the season in which donors are most inclined to give. Into this timeframe, we designed and inserted 1 Page

2 a multi-channel campaign that was a hybrid of direct response and branding designed to lift total response. The campaign was structured to drive interest by employing direct response TV, print ads, Web banners and transit ads to build awareness and drive donors to the website. To capture the majority of donations, we layered in core direct response vehicles: search engine marketing, and direct mail. Before going to market, we conducted quantitative online research to test new key messages and calls to action against the Red Cross traditional brand positioning of Change a life. Starting with your own. Based on these learnings, messaging, visuals and calls-to-action were developed and consistently implemented across all creative executions at both the national advertising and local market levels. And, we employed a tactic completely new to the Red Cross testing of the first Red Cross Holiday Giving Catalog both online and via direct mail as part of the campaign. Our intention was to learn if we could benefit from this growing category of holiday gift-giving: charitable gifts donated in the name of friends or family members. Creative approach Americans see the Red Cross as the organization they count on in a disaster. They re motivated by urgent needs and human suffering. But the then-current positioning line ( Change a life. Starting with your own. ) did not speak to ARC s distinctive strength. We needed a new theme for the campaign that would convey the urgency of the needs the everyday crises ARC responds to all year long. Our online research validated Give the gift that saves the day as the new positioning and callto-action for the campaign. Of course, we were also mindful that donors are bombarded with heart-tugging fundraising appeals during the holidays. We wanted to inspire them not only with what the Red Cross does, but with who the Red Cross really is: a nationwide movement of volunteers motivated by compassion by the desire to give comfort and hope to people in crisis, not just to meet their physical needs. We know donors identify with this compassion. It s what motivates them as well. To make this point, the campaign images show Red Cross volunteers delivering food and a hug to a hurricane victim, providing a shoulder to cry on for someone whose house just burned down, or comforting a frightened child in a shelter. In each case, we captured the moment when a victim s face began to change from despair to hope evoking feelings of gratitude and relief 2 Page

3 that the Red Cross was there. We believed donors would identify with the victims, too. One can t help but think, What if that were me? To call attention to these emotional moments, we placed a translucent square frame around the heart of each photo. In TV and Web banners, the frame fades up over the photo. The frame captures the Red Cross moment when heartbreak turns to hope. Every image communicates authenticity. We used existing photos shot in crisis situations, of actual volunteers and the people they helped. The photos aren t perfect, but they re real. This creative solution also enabled us to save money on TV and print production costs. 3 Page

4 Channels The ARC campaign ran from the week before Thanksgiving to New Year s Eve. To generate as many impressions and donations as efficiently as possible, we concentrated our 30-second TV spots in daytime and late evening (non-prime) slots on national cable networks. 4 Page

5 Full-page ads ran in five airline magazines in December, whose audiences rank extremely high in charitable giving (and had plenty of time to read the ads). We also used Web display ads and video banners to extend our reach and increase online response. Social networking strategies were employed through a Facebook Fan page, Giving Widget, Tweeting, Flickr page and the Red Cross Blog. FACEBOOK PAGE GIVING WIDGET RED CROSS BLOG RED CROSS FLICKR PAGE 5 Page

6 Search engine marketing, including Google Paid Search/Grants and Yahoo Paid Search, was key to the success of our surround sound strategy. The role of search was to convert donors driven to the Web by all media. We tested branded Red Cross terms as well as terms related to holiday charitable giving, constantly monitoring and optimizing and ramping up frequency in the last week. Several s to current donors drove response directly to either the Holiday Campaign landing page or the catalog website. Direct mail to Red Cross local chapter donors dropped in mid-november and mid-december, with a prospect mailing in late November. We also utilized a zip walk direct mail effort and freestanding inserts in newspapers in selected chapter markets. Outdoor is not generally an important part of a DR arsenal. But since this was indeed a hybrid DR and brand campaign, we created and employed billboards, transit posters and bus tails. A small 100,000 piece mailing of the catalog arrived in homes at the campaign launch. Both the printed and online catalogs offered free Red Cross T-shirts and first aid kits to incentivize higher dollar donations. Earned media outreach also played an important role in our success. As the campaign launched, a satellite media tour for the ARC CEO promoted the holiday campaign. The ARC celebrity cabinet was engaged to enhance campaign recognition. Earned media delivered nearly 23 million impressions during the campaign window. Outcome 2009 results The economy had tanked. We launched a new campaign amid the advertising clutter of the holiday season in direct competition with great charities like Salvation Army and St. Jude Children s Research Hospital who have made their holiday appeals an American tradition. Despite this challenging climate The campaign was a breakthrough success on five levels: 1. American Red Cross income increased by more than 5% over our historical results for the same time period. 2. Fueled by the campaign, total income for 4th quarter 2009 surpassed that of every year since 2000, with the exception of 2005 (following Hurricane Katrina). 3. We achieved an ROI of 2.35, or $2.35 in donations for every dollar spent, exceeding our campaign goal of 1:1. Importantly, a significant portion of the income came from new donors. (You ll remember that Red Cross historically has not been able to acquire new 6 Page

7 donors outside of disasters.) 4. The Holiday Giving Catalog exceeded all projections and laid the groundwork for a new revenue source. 5. Brand awareness increased by 6 percentage points. As Peggy Dyer, CMO of ARC says, That s something very hard to do when you re the Red Cross. The surround sound strategy proved that the whole is indeed larger than the sum of the parts. Post-campaign research showed that people who saw the advertising were twice as likely to donate as compared to those who hadn t seen it. TV, radio, print and online ads influenced 41% of donors. The majority of online gifts came through paid and organic search. And online gift size increased significantly over the prior year. And as a result, ARC commissioned us to conduct a more comprehensive holiday campaign in results 2010 saw increased success. By fine-tuning our multi-channel strategy based on our 2009 learnings, we: Increased income by 26% over 2009 Achieved an 11:1 ROI on search (goal was 4:1) Increased gift catalog income by 31% Increased average gift by 43% Won an Echo Award for campaign excellence in 2011 Perhaps most importantly, more Americans had the opportunity to experience the joy of giving the gift that saves the day. 7 Page