Curated worked with Marie Curie on a three month PR campaign, as part of an integrated SEO strategy devised by Marie Curie’s in-house SEO. The campaign worked to encourage involvement in, and donations to, The Great Daffodil Appeal.
The Challenge
To encourage involvement in, and donations to The Great Daffodil Appeal, Marie Curie’s annual appeal to raise money for Marie Curie nurses. Marie Curie provides end of life care to terminally ill patients and their families. The end goal was to achieve this using only digital PR.
The campaign would be broken into two phases: recruitment, which would involve encouraging audiences to take part in fundraising activities; and donation, which would focus on having people actually wanting to donate.
The Strategy
The main challenges in this campaign were two-fold: first, to gain the right type of exposure, and second, to create content that would spur people into action and donate. To do this, Curated researched the psychology behind giving, as well as the type of people who are more likely to give.
The content would drive the start of a ‘supporter journey’, which would engage readers in the process of giving, and make the idea of helping others something they could tangibly feel as being part of their own lives. Curated needed to expose the benefits of giving, and draw out the recognisably human impacts of it that its audience could relate to. The idea of being able to make change needed to be palpable, so that the audience felt it was something realistically within their power to do by getting involved in the campaign.
Messaging for phase one was both practical and aspirational, and gave information and ideas about how one might get involved in a fundraising event. Phase two took a more direct approach, and drew out human stories that were relevant to smaller, more engaged audiences.
Curated found in its research that interest in human stories was particularly strong within local communities: audiences were more likely to engage with and feel connected to stories about their own community, and feel more willing and able to contribute to making change. Publications for parents — particularly mum blogs — were also considered as targets, as the research showed that these groups were more likely to be interested in contributing to social good, and more likely to donate to a good cause.
For phase one, Curated targeted blogs who had created a sense of community with their followers: mum and dad bloggers, wedding bloggers, and a student newspaper. They pitched and created a mix of practical and emotive content that detailed how people might get involved with fundraising, as well as content promoting the campaign.
Phase two was more direct in nature, with content focused on human stories that drew out emotion and community spirit. Where better to place this content than local news outlets? Curated turned to its journalism roots to dig up stories that would be relevant to these communities, and found some remarkable stories about people who had been involved in, or affected by Marie Curie.
The Results
Curated managed to exceed its targets and gain coverage across a range of local news publications, as well as a few large national outlets, such as Lifehack. As suspected, it had the most success when pitching human interest, and news stories to outlets. All publications gained coverage exceeding the quality target it was given.