2015 Bronze Best Design or Art Direction

Proximity London

RNLI

Hold Tight, Hand Up

The Team

John Treacy - Executive Creative Director Suzanne Partridge - Managing Partner Emma Crean - Group Account Director
Lucy Usher - Account Director Jodie Armstrong-Downes - Senior Planner Kathy Howes - Head of Art Buying

Alex Buchanan-Dunlop - Senior Art Director Neil Williamson - Senior Copywriter Lucy Kilpatrick - Product Marketing Manager
Becs Phillips - Marketing Manager - Youth Elaine Williamson - Marketing Coordinator Duncan Beedie - Illustrator
Rob Hunter - Designer Faye Greenwood - Designer Sam Shaw - Animator Dan Keeble- Animator
Lawrence Kendrick- Sound Designer Dan Neale - Managing Director Fred Ashworth - Senior Music Producer

Campaign overview

With an ageing donor base, acquiring more support from the under 60s was a strategic imperative for the RNLI. Younger families were oblivious to the organisation during their occasional visit to the beach, so it had to discover a new relevance for this hard-to-reach audience. By translating a core piece of bodyboarding safety advice into a truly memorable phrase, RNLI did just this, engaging tens of thousands of families who had previously hardly noticed the charity and eliciting new donations.

Strategy

Over a third of RNLI’s rescues of children from UK beaches last year were bodyboarders, with 8-11 year-olds particularly vulnerable. But beach safety wasn’t part of parental dialogue. The campaign needed a fun mneumonic, just like road safety’s ‘stop, look and listen’, that alpha parents would actively seek to teach their kids. It is often the case that a child could have avoided further danger if they simply held onto their board. RNLI wanted to help lifeguards get this crucial advice across without appearing to be the ‘fun police’. It connected with parents and headstrong kids in a covert, non-preaching way, delivering advice that became part of family vocabulary: “Hold tight, hand up”.

Creativity

Aiming to create Edutainment that would carry this mneumonic in a form kids would play with and share with their friends, “Hold tight, hand up” was cocreated with a bunch of highly creative but highly opinionated kids. A cartoon world was developed, in which RNLI could credibly entertain and teach kids how to stay safe. The team deconstructed the characteristics that kids found most attractive in their favourite cartoon heroes and used these as a basis for four Beach Smart characters. These became the stars of the a wave guide, where they disguised important safety information as cool bodyboarding tips, a catchy original dance track that entertained, educated and instantly stuck in families’ minds, and on bodyboards themselves, which became a channel to carry cleverly designed lenticular stickers showing the characters in key safety positions.

Results

These touchpoints turned a stuffy safety message into a behaviourchanging campaign that initiated long-term relationship with potential new donors. The campaign delivered exceptional results, bringing a record number of new younger supporters onto the RNLI database. More than 55,000 new prospects were recruited in just seven weeks, 129% more than target. Double the number of safety packs were produced to keep up with demand. And 92% of those who interacted with the RNLI did so for the very first time, with social channels proving the right place to find 30,000 of these. This also delivered a significant new fundraising opportunity, with projections predicting 2,500 new donors worth £59,000 in incremental revenue. And the most important reward of all is that thousands of kids are now safer when playing in the sea.