By Sarah Dalling, Senior Legacy Marketing Manager, Barnardo's
At Loyalty Day 2023, Lucy Richardson, Legacy Marketing Manager, and I shared how collaboration and innovation enabled us to launch the first Barnardo’s legacy TV advertising campaign.
A new campaign like this is a huge opportunity for contacting a large-scale cold audience, and by extension, to grow loyalty with a brand new group of supporters.
We set out with a clear vision: to increase legacies for Barnardo’s, to re-energise the acquisition of new supporters, and to create an excellent supporter experience for those who engaged with us through the campaign.
What was the brief?
We wanted to create an advert that offered a future-focused view, without losing sight of the vital services Barnardo’s provides today. By connecting the relevance of our work in the present to our longevity as a charity, we can demonstrate to potential legacy pledgers how they can also offer long-term support to the communities that we serve.
Barnardo’s delivers more than 800 services to children and young people across the UK, and this campaign also needed to demonstrate the breadth of our work to a new audience - in a way that is clear and easy to understand. At the same time, it had to be emotive – forging a connection with the viewer, whether they have a personal connection to Barnardo’s or not.
Finally, we wanted the campaign development process to increase internal awareness of legacy giving amongst colleagues and trustees. This would ultimately help to create an improved supporter experience for all our new pledgers soon to be coming on board.
It was a bold new venture, and we were excited to get started!
How did we do it?
Throughout the campaign, we were guided by some key principles:
Don’t reinvent the wheel! Our Individual Giving and Brand & Marketing teams have access to a wealth of content and expertise that we could draw on for this campaign.
Involve the right people - at the right time. We set up a core stakeholder group to help navigate the large structure of our organisation – this was essential in the collaboration process, and resulted in appropriate, inclusive and timely feedback.
Be as inclusive as possible. Our internal Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) team worked closely with us to make sure we were approaching all aspects of the campaign development process in a truly inclusive way.
Be bold, be brave. This principle led us to choose a media agency who we knew would help us to push the boundaries of our creative approach to designing the ad.
Get our communication right, internally and externally. None of this would have happened without ensuring that we communicated clearly with all stakeholders, allowing us to deliver an ad that we could all be proud of - on time, and in budget!
This isn’t an exhaustive list of the core stakeholders, as we collaborated with a wide range of teams on the feedback, sign-off and decision-making at every stage: from Digital Marketing to Strategy and External Affairs, and from the Retail team to our CEO.
And here it is, the finished result! Take a look here: Gifts in Wills TV advert – Be More Gladys | Barnardo’s (youtube.com)
What did we learn?
We learnt that collaborating with others was a pivotal part of helping us to achieve authenticity in our campaign. As a result, the final ad reflected multiple voices and experiences across the organisation and our wider community – for example, the events seen in the video are an authentic representation of our work, thanks to valuable input from our Children’s Services team.
The process for developing the campaign heightened awareness at all levels of the charity around legacies, and this has led to a smarter, more integrated approach to the supporter journey. More awareness of legacies means that we hope to see more colleagues having organic conversations about legacies with supporters, which can spark interest in a more personalised and supporter-centered way.
What happens next?
Promoting legacy giving internally is a long game, and this campaign was no exception. As income is not seen immediately, we’ve had to find different measures and new ways to communicate the impact and success of our advertising campaign with all our stakeholders.
For example, we’re using our Brand Tracker to measure legacy awareness and intention – where we’ve already seen a positive shift of 1.2% for Legacy Intention – and we’re also measuring web traffic, which we saw increase to 810% while the TV ad was live in
October 2023.
If you’re looking to embark on a similar campaign, these are my five key takeaways:
Keep legacy giving front of mind across your charity – always!
Collaborate with other teams and stakeholders throughout your campaign.
Integrate with other activity across your charity as much as possible.
Test, test, test!
Take colleagues on the journey with you – involve them, share your successes and keep them up to date with your progress.
I hope this has been a useful journey through our first ever legacy TV campaign. Ensuring that our key principles for developing the campaign were underpinned by collaboration has led to a more cohesive approach, across the organisation, to legacy stewardship – and by extension, beginning to create an excellent supporter experience and growing our supporter loyalty.
If you’d like to hear more, you can watch the full presentation from Lucy and I on the About Loyalty Youtube channel: Loyalty Day — Barnardo's Legacy case study.
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