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How to give your creative a ‘killer’ edge…

If you’ve been keeping up with our content, you may have already heard about (or even attended!) a Killer Zoom Room event, where we’ve explored ‘Getting the Green Light’ on new project ideas and ‘Insight for Product Development’. Hosted on Zoom, this series of virtual events aimed at fundraising teams are where we share our insights, advice and example campaigns, followed by a group discussion to share and compare experiences. For our next session, we are turning our attention to the creative process.

The focus will be on getting the approach right to developing fundraising campaign creative that is engaging and compelling. Something that delivers against your commercial drivers but also makes you proud to say “Look, I did that!”. Details to sign up are at the bottom of this article, but in the meantime get your creative juices flowing with these 4 top tips for producing ‘killer’ creative…

Build recognition

We ask a lot of campaign creative. We want it to flex for different audiences and work across different channels; we want to test which perform best and be able to optimise our messaging and creative in-flight.

Against this backdrop, our top tip for making amazing campaign creative, while delivering against these strategic goals, is (perhaps surprisingly) consistency. By making a campaign consistent, the whole becomes so much greater than the sum of its parts; we make the most of every touchpoint, cumulatively building recognition, familiarity and connection.

Death by a 1,000 cuts

I know what it’s like from my time at Cancer Research UK and AOL – you want colleagues to be supportive and bought-into your project, but you also want the autonomy and freedom to make decisions and give direction without having to consult everyone and their cat!

This is never more important than when it comes to creative. So many times we see the project owner excited to go ahead with a chosen creative route, only to find it tweaked, altered and diluted through the internal process until it ends up losing its original spark. Make sure you don’t fall into this trap by agreeing a set number of amends and pre-agreeing a RACI framework.

Brand balance

Staying on a similar topic, our next tip is about getting the brand balance right. A lot of our clients come to us because they want to push the boundaries and do something different. They’ve seen the Dechox chocolate fingers and rabbit, the Bake for Heroes cake tank and the Dryathlon athletes in training, and want their own stand-out campaign.

And in truth, these are our favourite briefs. We love to be able to look at things a different way and push those boundaries. But in order for us to know which boundaries to push, we all need to be clear upfront on which rules can flex and which are non-negotiable, giving you (and us) the framework for creative that gets people excited for all the right reasons.

Invest in what’s important

We’ve all learnt from our online shopping habits that it’s a life-truth you often get what you pay for! And this is certainly true when it comes to campaign imagery. There is a plethora of great stock imagery out there, and there has never been a creative concept that we haven’t managed to find a suitable image for. For a campaign that really sparkles however, we’d definitely recommend investing in photography over stock images. This gives you total control of the images so you automatically get stand out and authenticity. It also means you then have a bank of high-quality, bespoke photography that can be used not just in the campaign but across the organisation – so you really do get bang for your buck!

If the tips above pique your interest and you’d like to join us for a deeper dive into the topic, please join us for the next Zoom Room on 19th August at 10am. Email suzy.kennedy@killercreative.co.uk to register or find out more.