How ntegrity and World Vision International (WVI) turned an Earth Day campaign into something unexpected.
A few weeks ago, World Vision International (WVI) and ntegrity kicked off a campaign for their giving product, Childhood Rescue on World Earth Day.
But this was not your average ‘World Day’ campaign or standard giving product.
It was a bold campaign that wanted to do something unexpected - to catch attention of a younger donor base AND drive fundraising. The campaign showed how climate change could ripple out in unexpected ways and impact vulnerable children.
We interviewed Elisha Smallcombe, WVI’s Senior Advisor of Product Development and Innovation, about why “unexpected” creates impact amongst younger donors.
Question: The campaign linked climate change and child sexual exploitation. It’s not an obvious link, so why did you want to focus on it?
Elisha: Childhood Rescue is about reaching the most vulnerable children in dangerous places. World Vision has been seeing the effects of climate change on these communities for many years.
Our target audience of young millennials are passionate about climate change. So we wanted to bring this issue of climate change to light while staying true to World Vision’s mission as a humanitarian organisation.
We know that the world's poorest children contribute the least to climate change, but they're impacted the most through droughts and flooding. Earth Day is a time that the world is already talking about climate change, so we used this moment to elevate the voices of these communities and children.
Question: Tell us about the challenge you came to ntegrity with?
Elisha: We wanted to take this big topic and ask: how can we get that interesting hook to get people to pay attention?
ntegrity came up with this great idea of explaining that climate change has unexpected impacts that people - especially our audiences in developed countries - wouldn't usually be aware of.
We came across the story of a young girl who was forced into child sexual exploitation because of the drought in her community. We've seen climate change in Australia through bushfires and flooding, but sexual exploitation is not something that you usually link climate change to.
Question: How does a large, global campaign like this roll out? How many offices, people and markets are we talking about? And how did this campaign work?
Elisha: World Vision has 21 different fundraising offices around the world. Our job as the international office is to provide resources and insights on the audience and fundraising best practice. We provide a clear toolkit to our offices so we can speak with one voice and build global impact and trust within all of our markets.
We knew ntegrity's experience lay with fundraising campaigns. At the same time as we were telling these emotive, unexpected stories, we also really wanted to drive donations for Childhood Rescue to support these communities. We wanted to partner with an agency that understood how to link a powerful creative idea to drive fundraising results.
So ntegrity supported us by developing:
A strong campaign concept for Childhood Rescue and Earth Day that did the unexpected and linked climate change to child sexual exploitation
The campaign assets and creative for WVI’s offices around the world to roll this out across their channels
An accompanying digital toolkit that instructed offices how to roll out the campaign, with a special focus on fundraising
The fundraising toolkit has been really well-received across our audiences and offices. Even our non-fundraising offices use the resources to build awareness in their own countries.
We are still gathering the initial results, but it has been really encouraging so far. We saw three of our biggest markets - Canada, the UK and the US - use our Earth Day resources. We're really looking forward to the results!
You can watch the full interview here: