2018 Bronze Best use of door drops

Agency: Medialab

Client: Age UK

Campaign name: Mitigating loss of cold DM with a new channel for sustainable growth

Campaign overview

Warming up cold direct mail

The brief

Cold direct mail (DM) generated a significant portion of sales for Age UK’s lottery programme – but GDPR posed a serious threat.

The charity needed to revise its acquisition and strategic approaches in new and existing channels to keep growing long-term.

Strategy

Charities face increasing challenges: decreasing number of people giving to charity year on year; only 50% believe charities are trustworthy; and a decrease in frequency of giving – 13% give to charity rarely, 5% never do.

Age UK raises funds to provide vital care and support for the UK’s older, lonely population.

In 2017, only 3% of donations were for charities supporting the elderly.

As GDPR threatened to impact Age UK Lottery’s most effective method of player recruitment – cold DM – any further loss would be critical.

In-depth analysis was crucial.

Building on existing insight, audience consumption tools and attribution modelling, Age UK sought to understand key channels for primary and secondary audience, and to build a strategy to reach those audiences through a multichannel approach.

Creativity

The key campaign note focused on the fact that Lottery prizes are guaranteed and not subject to rollovers.

Audience insight and creative testing revealed the primary audience were best engaged through humour and had a close affinity to animals.

So creative across the TV ad and door drops featured dogs to illustrate the rollover idea and drive engagement, with several variations of the door drop created for different audience segments.

Following initial testing, they ran the door drop activity concurrently with DRTV, the campaign then tested an upweighted regional TV campaign before the door drop to create initial awareness.

The TV ad then ran throughout the door drop campaign to ensure the DRTV activity complemented the door drop activity and vice versa.

Results

The new channels (DRTV and door drops) were launched in October during the test phase of the campaign and achieved immediate success, generating the highest ever number of Lottery entries in one month.

The campaign achieved significant ROI improvements through channel mix optimisation and joined-up door drop and DRTV activity – with an uplift of 1.67% on door drop response, and a significant drop in CPA.

The campaign successfully reached a new, younger audience, and contributed to a more balanced audience profile, indicating broader product appeal, and generating new players.

The lottery programme is now the UK’s biggest charity lottery programme.

The campaign enabled Age UK to exceed its annual target with lower costs per sale in the 2017-18 financial year.

Team

Medialab - Will Davis, Group Planning Director - Alex Kirk, Managing Director - Matt Semple, Senior Account Director

Age UK - Alison Fraser, Senior Marketing Manager - Amy Leung, Marketing Manager - Sue Daniels, Marketing Director

Contributors

Drayton Bird Associates and WPN Chameleon