ICAWC 2012 : Debbie Curtis Making the most of Communication Opportunities
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ICAWC 2012 : Debbie Curtis Making the most of Communication Opportunities
- 1. Making the most of communications opportunities Debbie Curtis Communications Development Manager Blue Cross
- 2. Overview • Blue Cross communications • How communications can help • Sharing some Blue Cross experiences • Opportunities and challenges
- 3. About Blue Cross • The charity dedicated to helping sick, injured and homeless pets since 1897 • Today we run four animals hospitals and 12 rehoming centres across the UK
- 4. Our communications team Communications Team Media team Digital team Creative Services Media relations Digital strategy Brand development strategy Website management Print and Reputation / crisis production Social media management Search marketing Advertising Publications / copywriting E-marketing
- 5. How can communications help? • Raise the profile of your work • Engage with more supporters • Engage with potential volunteers • Change behaviours
- 6. What are you trying to do and why? • Rooted in your corporate objectives • Aims will influence attitudes and behaviours
- 7. Who are you trying to reach? • Financial supporters • Rehomers • Political opinion formers • Volunteers • Staff • Teachers
- 8. What are you trying to get them to think or do? What ever the message, make it: • Simple • Creative/interesting • Timely
- 9. What resources do you have? Telling stories using….. • Case studies • Video • Photos • Good copy • Engaging spokespeople
- 10. How will you reach your audiences?
- 11. Seeing (and grabbing) the opportunities • Reacting quickly • Taking a risk • Thinking how you can maximise Now which one’s Geri? • Being creative Guinea pigs named after red-headed stars • Seasonal opportunities • Tying in with world events
- 12. Blue Cross news stories…..
- 13. Blue Cross news stories…..
- 14. Blue Cross news stories….. Visits to Blue Cross website: Links from news 48,701 in one weekend articles: BBC, Sun, Mail Facebook: story shared 2,500 times Twitter: retweeted 90 times
- 15. Blue Cross news stories….. Youtube video had 94,000 views
- 16. Making the most of opportunities
- 17. Undercover Boss Traditional Internal comms media Social media Fundraising Communications strategy Key messages Target audiences Target media News angles
- 18. Long-lead media
- 19. Website content
- 20. Website content
- 21. Undercover Boss
- 22. Short-lead media
- 23. Results 2.3 million viewers 35,000 website visits 337 new Facebook friends 45 press articles 13 radio interviews £7,000 cash donations £4,000 in direct debits
- 24. War Horse – the movie • With the worldwide launch of Hollywood film War Horse, we took the opportunity to highlight Blue Cross’s history helping horses in the First World War
- 25. War Horse - our online archive • To make the most of the public interest in war horses, we decided to share the moving pictures and stories from our archives with the public through our website
- 26. War Horse • Features promoting the archive appeared in the Daily Telegraph, Horse & Hound and on BBC radio and regional papers
- 27. Opportunities and challenges Challenges • Risking precious funds • Finding the time • Opening yourself up for criticism • Keeping up with the ever-changing world Opportunities • Engaging content – animals! • Free and easy technology • Changing communication allows direct access to supporters
- 28. Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- Hello!
- 2 - About The Blue Cross: We provide treatment and seek happy homes for thousands of pets Hamsters to horses promote animal welfare to the pet owners of the future by giving talks at schools and youth groups. We help current pet owners with through a range of free pet advice leaflets. Huge drive to raise awareness to support fundraising and allow us to grow. Quadrupled national media coverage in the last year. Big focus on engagement through social media and driving visits to our website. 15% increase in the last year.
- 3 - Our communications team: Over the last five years, our digital strategy has completely transformed. When I started at The Blue Cross five years ago our digital team was a website and publications team – focused on producing copy for the website and publications in a very one-way form of communications. Since then we have launched a new, more interactive website and introduced specific roles focusing on social media and search marketing. Important ant that our teams work very closely together to achieve maximum impact. The communications industry has completely changed in the last few years and we all need to recognise the importance of an integrated on- and off-line media strategy.
- First thing we need to ask is what are you trying to do and why For Blue Cross, our vision is that every pet will enjoy a healthy life in a happy home We try and reflect this when we are communicating stories about pets that need rehoming, or when we are talking raising awareness about issues that face pets and their owners such as parvo outbreaks, rabbit welfare lung worm Establish the aim of you communications Are you trying to influence policy Are you trying to rehome animals Are you trying to change pet owners’ behaviours? Are
- Who are the people that will help you deliver those aims? For us our supporters are empty nesters and older audiences with a female bias However, we are also looking to influence policy and influence the behaviours of future pet owners. It depends on the story we are selling in
- Using case studies As we’ve seen, real life case studies are one of the most powerful ways to communicate a message. We have a network of colleagues at our centres looking out for stories for us. They will write them up and take photos of particularly interesting stories and load them onto a central system so we can all see them. Use your networks – often people don't realise how interesting their animals or jobs are These days it is free and easy to film video content on a phone or digital camera and upload it to Youtube to share with social networks. As we all know the internet was invented for cats…… But if you have some budget available, professional video case studies can be a strong asset to help sell in a story to the traditional media. We are all lucky to be working in a field that provides us with a great subject matter – pets. People can’t get enough of weird and wonderful and cute imagery of pets and Spokespeople are key – don’t’ have to be the most senior, but they need to be engagement. We have a wonderful veterinary colleague who was featured on breakfast television talking about the growing kitten crisis. It helped that she was armed with a cute kitten but despite the 5am start she was warm, funny, articulate and engaging and as a result we were contacted for her to go onto other interviews for that day….she was a good talker!
- The world of communications is a rapidly changing environment and so it’s important to understand how your audience consumes their information For example Children – TV/radio, social networking, magazines games, schools Youth –digital communicaiotns,radio TV One thing we’ve learned over the last five years is that it’s important to integrate our communications across all our platforms – particularly between online and traditional media
- Often making the most of communications opportunities involves all the planning and forethought, but often opportunities arise that need quick reactions. Thinking about seasonality - pictures in snow, ice lollies for hot dogs Tying in with world events – royal weddings, sporting events, Naming after celebrities – ginger pigs and ginger stars – geri haliwell, fergi
- 16 – Integrated news stories Now I want to show you some examples of news stories that have done well on-and off-line and how we’ve used them to different effect. These are all from our animal adoption centres – this cat Charlie had unfortunately had both its ears and nose removed due to skin cancer, and as a result looked unfortunately similar to the Harry Potter character Lord Voldermort! He was struggling to find a new home, but after we ran a rehoming appeal through a news agency we were inundated with calls to rehome him from all over the world. Articles across the national papers drove visits to our website – but we didn’t get the photos through from the news agency in time and we noticed a high bounce rate when people weren’t finding the information they wanted on our site. The learning point was to make sure the information is up and easy to find for maximum impact.
- 17 – Integrated news stories (Voldemog) This next story came from a our Hertfordshire adoption centre, they had just taken in a litter of ten puppies whose mother had been killed by a car. Timely The puppies hadn’t even been given names, so we suggested calling them after England rugby players, who had been enjoying success on the pitch in the Six Nations championship. Obviously you have to pick your moment! We got our own photographer in this time and made sure the pictures were online before the story went out with links to our rehoming and donation pages. The story was picked up by the Sun, Mail and BBC online and proved a hit with social media – and this time we had a better impact on our online figs.
- 18 – Integrated news stories (rugby puppies) In one weekend we saw a spike of nearly 50,000 visits to our website, and we had lots of interest on Facebook and Twitter. Analysis of our website visits showed a clear increase in visits to our adoption and donation pages.
- 19 – Integrated news stories (Alice) When the story of Alice came along – a deaf puppy rehomed with a deaf family where she would be taught sign language – we saw an opportunity to add more value on our website. We asked the new owners to take a video of Alice being taught sign language and put it on Youtube with a call to donate, which was then embedded into our website. Again there was widespread national coverage driving visits to our site but this time people could see the video of Alice and share the link. It was shared across the world, including influential blog sites like Newslite in the US and Labaq in Japan. The video has had just under 94,000 views to date - so you can see the impact when you get it right!
- 20 – Undercover Boss As we’ve seen, integrated on- and off-line stories can have a big impact on supporters and help encourage donations. In 2011, our chief executive Kim Hamilton was given the unique opportunity to feature in Channel 4’s prime time TV programme Undercover Boss. Here is a short clip just to give you an idea. .
- 21 – Undercover Boss As the first charity to appear on the series, we had a unique opportunity to raise awareness of our work amongst a primetime television audience and plug into a younger-than-average supporter profile. The challenge we faced was how to make the most of such an opportunity and translate viewing figures into donations Our communications planning was split into media, digital, internal and fundraising streams with clearly identified target audiences, media and messages. We worked with the Channel 4 press office, but quickly realised we were a low priority and would need to do most of the leg work ourselves.
- 22 – Undercover Boss Our first target group were the long-lead trade and consumer press, including TV mags, women’s interest, pink press, animal and charity magazines. We picked out the main characters from the filming and prepared feature stories and interviews to sell in.
- 23 – Undercover Boss At this stage, our digital team was busy pulling together plans to build interest amongst online audiences and drive interest through social media to our website. We were liaising with the Channel 4 press office but unfortunately they would not allow us to use any of the programme clips or promotional material for our website. But instead, we provided plenty of information and interviews for the programme’s official site. After some persuasion we even managed to get a one-off ‘text to donate’ option added… if you don’t ask, you don’t get!
- 24 – Undercover Boss After discovering that we could not use the Channel 4 content for our website, we decided to produce our own audio-visual content. The digital team set about developing an Undercover Boss -themed homepage based around the main themes of the programme. We knew the audience would be interested in a litter of kittens who were filmed being born during the programme. So nine weeks on we filmed her being reunited with the kittens before they went to new homes – generating some emotional and heartfelt content for the website. Another theme was our practice of collecting stray dogs from Ireland where the animal welfare situation is much worse than here – something that brought Kim to tears during the filming. We produced an audio slideshow with professional pictures of the dogs and interviews with Kim, the centre staff and a family who had adopted one of them. Video: 50 secs
- 22 – Undercover Boss Finally, the overriding theme running through the programme, and our work as a charity, was the overbreeding and abandonment of Staffordshire bull terriers. Realising the huge opportunity to raise awareness of this important issue, the digital team designed a daring online ‘Dogs Bollox’ campaign with animations to educate people about the importance of neutering. There was also a novel virtual gift idea to give people the chance to support our neutering efforts by buying some virtual testicles for £2. The campaign had a great response on social media and the two animations have had over 3,000 views. Video: 47 secs
- 23 – Undercover Boss With a few weeks to go, we started targeting the short lead media and identified regional angles for stories. We also prepared an embargoed press release to go out on the day of broadcast with full details of the programme content, focusing on the animal welfare ‘crisis’ of unwanted Staffies. An exclusive interview with Kim was secured for the Sun but was unfortunately dropped from the paper, as was an interview on Five Live the morning after broadcast due to breaking news about phone hacking. The perils of working with the media! However, we did get ‘must watch’ recommendations in the Sun and Mirror and an enhanced listing in the Radio Times.
- 25 – Undercover Boss On the day of broadcast, the programme was plugged in the Society Guardian and Horse & Hound daily emails, along with other news sites. It pulled in 2.3 millon viewers and had a fantastic response on social media, driving people to the unique content on our website. 87% of the online traffic went through Twitter and Blue Cross tweets were retweeted 125 times during the programme. You can see some of the other results there, including donations, and we were really pleased with the response.
- With the worldwide launch of Hollywood film War Horse , we took the opportunity to highlight Blue Cross’s history helping horses in the First World War. While we were unable to secure an official partnership with filmmakers Disney, we made the most of the interest generated by the film with a range of different activities When the National Army Museum in Chelsea announced a new exhibition, War Horse: Fact & Fiction , we loaned them a poster from the Blue Cross archives for public display.
- We published over 100 items showing Blue Cross’s work in the war, including letters, books, photos and videos
- A full page advert was booked in the War Horse theatre programme , in anticipation of increased visitor numbers. And a cinema trailer was produced to be shown before the War Horse film in 109 cinema screens in the London area The War Horse UK premiere took place in January and further press releases were issued to highlight Blue Cross’s history National TV interviews were given to Blue Peter , ITV Daybreak , the BBC News Channel and British Forces News .
- 26 – Opportunities & Challenges In the media world, things are constantly changing. It’s essential to keep up with the latest developments to keep ahead of the game. Charities do immensely important work and as a result we often have extremely engaging content at our fingertips – make the most of it. Use the free technology that is available, e.g. audioboo, Storify, Google grants If you get knocked back by the traditional media, use your own website or social media to go directly to your supporters.