ActionAid is an international charity working with women and girls to create a more just, equitable and sustainable future. A recent YouGov survey highlighted that a key challenge the charity is facing is a lack of awareness for the charity and its work. ActionAid wanted to use its Christmas appeal to both drive cash donations and raise awareness for the life-changing work that it does.
All ActionAid’s work is underscored by an anti-racist storytelling (ARST) approach to ensure that campaign messaging is representative of the women and girls the charity supports and doesn’t perpetuate negative stereotypes. All media decisions must align with these values. We needed to find ways to test a variety of formats with the ARST approach at the forefront of the campaign to capture learnings for future media planning.
We decided to explore a media partnership as they can provide clients with added value, creative production assistance and the opportunity to run across multiple channels in a single campaign. Using audience profiling data, we found that the Guardian and Observer index highly for ActionAid’s audiences across both digital and print media. Our historic press and insert campaigns also showed strong results in both titles, with the Observer driving ActionAid’s highest donations and most efficient CPA in our Christmas 2023 press campaign. Finally, the publisher aligns with ActionAid’s values and could give the client reassurance that any content created would be done in the right tone while showcasing the amazing work that the charity does. For these reasons, we chose the Guardian for ActionAid’s media partnership for Christmas 2024.
As part of the media partnership, we negotiated 27% added value from the Guardian which was invested into print press ads, social amplification and targeted display ads across the Guardian website and ‘takeover days’ on the Guardian News and Society pages. The added value secured also allowed us to undertake a post-campaign ad effectiveness research study to measure uplift in awareness.
The campaign itself followed the stories of ActionAid workers and refugees in Bangladesh, Poland and Uganda. By partnering with the Guardian we were able to access its creative production expertise to develop content that ran across print ads, podcast spots, socials and online articles. We worked closely with the Guardian’s production team to ensure that all creative featured the right CTA to encourage cash donation and that onsite user journeys were optimised.
A highlight of the campaign was a double page spread advertorial in the Observer, where a Guardian journalist interviewed ActionAid’s head of programmes and fundraising in Uganda, Mercy Grace Munduru. In the interview, Mercy spoke about two major refugee settlements in Uganda and the work ActionAid does to support women there including providing education and training to women who have faced gender-based violence.
The brand uplift study showed that the Guardian’s readers felt that ActionAid’s appeal was informative and relatable, positioning ActionAid as a charity that supports women and girls, with 90% of readers feeling that the campaign was clear and easy to understand while being informative and interesting. Of the different messaging used, the pieces that discussed the education of women and girls by ActionAid drove the highest response and dwell time. The fabric takeover on the News page of the Guardian’s website far exceeded the benchmark CTR (0.26% vs 0.16%). These are two examples of learnings we will take into future campaigns. Sentiment towards the charity benefitted as a result of the campaign, with 83% of readers feeling more positively towards ActionAid and 82% believing that ActionAid is a charity they can trust. Alongside these brand metrics, the study also showed that 75% of readers wanted to donate to ActionAid.
You can read more about our previous brand awareness work with ActionAid here.
Hero picture: Monica, leader of the Voice of the Voiceless Women Association, at the Imvepi refugee settlement in north-west Uganda. Photograph: Immaculate Bashaba/ActionAid.
