Portfolio UNICEF Denmark
Follow your inner calling
Untraditional NGO campaign motivates members to keep supporting
UNICEF needs permanent supporters as an NGO to continue its important work in the world’s hotspots. So, we helped create a campaign film with a slightly untraditional approach to showing the benefits of being part of their member community. The aim was to acknowledge current supporters and attract new ones too. The campaign film became a huge success in terms of VTR, website visits and increased sales.
Challenge
Purpose means more to us than ever. Whether it's where we purchase our groceries, which shoes we buy or which retirement pension company we choose, we get important (and sometimes overwhelming) messages about sustainability, recycling, animal welfare and good deeds. That's nice, but it also puts pressure on NGOs who suddenly don't have ‘a patent on the good deed’.
Due to declining membership growth,UNICEF Denmark wanted to reinvent their regular supporter concept. Because without permanent supporters, UNICEF can’t carry out its work in the world's hotspots.
Insight
NGO communication is often designed to create a bad conscience and articulate a burning platform or even a disaster. Ads, phone calls, and facers are efficient but annoying to potential members. It works in the short run, but to many supporters, the direct effect of the monthly support is unclear.
Two insights stood out through interviews with existing and potential members of UNICEF’s membership program: Danes prefer to support the big NGOs where they know the money goes to the right place. And they don’t support NGOs to get acknowledged by others... buuut they still think it's nice if other people notice it.
Solution
We created the concept 'Follow Your Inner Calling' based on these insights – a film where we meet current UNICEF’s supporters, who use an animal call to alert each other when help is needed.
The purpose was to show that being part of the member community does have an important purpose and impact. Well, we also ensured that the campaign was original and didn’t look like anything you'd seen before.
Directed by the talented Bertil Vorre, the film is unique, exciting and not least fun. It shows a delicate balance between communicating a serious message and using humour simultaneously, and the target audience loved the new approach.
Results
Until today, it is the most watched campaign film from UNICEF Denmark with approx. Eight hundred thousand digital views plus TV and cinema. The film got an average view time of 41 out of 45 seconds.
In addition, the campaign generated 54,000 visits to UNICEF Denmark's website, which is 82 % more visits than in the whole of 2020. The visitors also spent three more minutes on the website; most importantly, sales increased by almost 200 % on UNICEF’s webshop.
