2014 Silver Best Use of Social Media for Customer Acquisition

Client WaterAid

How did the campaign make a difference? This summer WaterAid asked one simple question: “What does it mean to be a girl?”

It means many different things around the world. Perhaps to be happy, determined, carefree or feisty. But for millions it means something very different and darker.

WaterAid’s starting point was social – it’s where the world debates. It harnessed social channels and techniques to challenge supporters to explore the different lives of girls around the world – and find out how they could contribute to make other girls’ lives better.

The campaign drove profound engagement and donations from women aged 18-24 – a new audience for WaterAid. It proved a new model for effective social fundraising and for driving huge volumes of traffic to WaterAid content. And it produced a year one ROI of 1.4 on donor acquisition for this social activity.

Strategy WaterAid needed to reach people who shared its values and would give. But it also wanted to reach out to younger women, an audience who rarely give to charity.

Charities can engage a new audience in social media with compelling story telling, but often fail to convert that attention to income. So WaterAid defined a specific role for social media: initial top of funnel engagement.

To Be A Girl focuses on the differences in girls’ lives across the globe and turned this into social content. But to persuade people to give, social activity was integrated with other paid digital channels and WaterAid’s organic social strategy to create compelling journeys that led to donation.

The campaign was highly reactive to wider markets, monitoring girlrelated news and commercial activity around the first UK Girl Summit and the Dove #likeagirl campaign.

Creativity WaterAid created challenging content that stood out in a cluttered environment and instantly caught the eye. By challenging perceptions of what it means to be a girl, the charity was able to talk about taboos such as sanitation, menstruation and rape to provoke comment and elicit meaningful engagement.

A vast range of creative executions enabled storytelling for different audiences at different stages of the journey – including 251 iterations for Facebook, 52 for Twitter, website cards, video tweets and promoted tweets and posts.

And WaterAid became the first advertiser to use Quantcast Tailored Audience Segmentation to create custom lookalike prospect audiences from both social and site data. The campaign could then track individuals and tailor their journeys across the web – continuing a conversation started in Twitter onto Facebook, the To Be A Girl website, on display placed across the web and in search.

Results The campaign set out to use social media to foster engagement with new supporters and drive traffic to the campaign website – which it did, and at volume.

49% of total campaign traffic came from social activity, with social traffic acting as the feeder for subsequent retargeting activity. The activity successfully reached new audiences, with 50% of donations coming from women aged 18-24 – virtually unheard of in charity fundraising. And WaterAid proved that fundraising budgets invested in paid social media could generate the level of returns expected from other media – with an immediate ROI of 1.40 in the first seven weeks, and rising.

The campaign not only established future growth opportunities for WaterAid but has been the major traffic driver for a campaign that has already raised more than £1.8 million to change the future for girls across the world whose days are defined by unsafe dirty water.