Urgent Winter Appeal

Background

Age UK has seen great success in the last couple of years with individual giving campaigns through Christmas and the cold winter months – when older people suffer more and public sympathy is higher.

Historically these campaigns were print-first. We have partnered with Age UK on a number of fundraising products, so when they wanted to bring in digital expertise, we were an obvious choice.

The brief

We worked with Age UK on their February Cold Weather Campaign. Our brief was to build on learnings from the previous four years to increase income by inspiring the target audience to give to Age UK’s winter appeal, becoming new supporters.

Our priorities were recruiting new donors, audience diversification and channel testing.

The work

Our starting point was to learn from the wealth of existing data. We gathered insight from previous cold weather campaigns, other Age UK campaigns, and current market analysis. We used this information to help define a target audience that offered a mix of proven prospects and growth opportunities, campaign and messaging strategy, messaging, creative and calls to action.

Our campaign focused on four motivating themes that reflected the current social climate that would be relevant and create a connection with our audience groups: loneliness, health, energy and all.

The campaign ran across paid social, display and audio. There was a detailed test and learn matrix to gather maximum insight into channels, formats, audiences, messages, creative and asks.

The results

• Regular Giving income 76% above target
• Significant increase in Regular Giving donors (+23%)
• Regular Giving Average gift above target
• Average cash gift slightly above target
• CTR double the target
• Wealth of insight to inform future campaigns
• We subsequently worked with Age UK on the Spring IG campaign.