Engaging Americans in Extreme Poverty
The Challenge Concern Worldwide is an international NGO dedicated to the eradication of extreme poverty worldwide. While Concern is a household name in it’s home country of Ireland, it’s brand awareness was below 4% in the US. I was hired to grow fundraising dollars, which started with getting not only growing brand awareness, but getting Americans to care. With a limited budget, we needed to maximize eyeballs in a cost-effective way.
My Role
Director of Marketing Responsible for research, strategy development, briefing and managing creative, media, and web development agencies, and measurement.
Company
Concern Worldwide US
Year
2021
#UNFORTUNATELYFAKENEWS
*
CONCERN WORLDWIDE US
*
#UNFORTUNATELYFAKENEWS * CONCERN WORLDWIDE US *
The Strategy
For better or worse, research shows that Americans tend to focus on national issues, with little long-term regard for international crises. There is a lot of sensational news and issues in the world that people are invested in. Even when it comes to charity, they are driven by urgency and media attention. So before we could start telling Concern’s story, we had to get our audience's attention. While NGOs have historically done this with gripping images, it was time to break reliance on “poverty porn” and hook target audiences in a different way.
The Approach
We created a culturally disruptive campaign fake news campaign that that thrust extreme poverty and Concern Worldwide into the spotlight. Digital videos were produced mimicking a local news format and tongue-in-cheek headlines nodded to well-known individuals and companies to point out the sharp inequality in wealth worldwide. To maximize budget, we identified target markets with a crossover of our target demographic and affordable media. We also developed a text-only creative approach for stills, which allowed for more versioning without heavy production.
We used a text-only approach in the fake news-style, alluding to well-known individuals and companies. This allowed us to develop, segment, and test versions with agility, drafting off the news of the day.
We placed targeted out of home buys in high traffic locations, customizing language to maximize interest. The example below is directly across the street from the entrance to CNN in Atlanta, GA.
We developed a custom fundraising page with an improved user experience that connected to the campaign creative. When visitors clicked an add link or scanned the QR code from street level OOH, they were directed to this friction-free donation experience. Clicking on the header logo took visitors to the Concern Worldwide US website so they could learn more about the organization.
