Celebrating the holiday spirit with a touch of kindness, Bilderlings embarked on a remarkable journey one year ago. In collaboration with Hearts & Minds (UK) and Dr. Klauns (Latvia), the company launched the ‘Saving Smiles’ project, a heartwarming initiative dedicated to spreading cheer through healthcare clowning. This project, initiated in April, not only produced outstanding results but also redefined the concept of corporate social responsibility. Beyond the numbers, it became a testament to unity within the Bilderlings team and an inspiring example of how businesses can make a profound impact on society while nurturing the spirit of generosity among their clients.
Merchandise: From Concept to Realization
The idea was: To release by Christmas a joint charitable merchandise that would reflect our common values (Bilderlings, Hearts & Minds, Dr.Klauns). Here, we had to work hard to find wording that would fully correspond to us and to the Clowndoctors — i.e., we were looking for our common messages. All funds raised from the sale of the merchandise would be sent to Hearts&Minds and Dr.Klauns.
Why we chose merchandise: because, on the one hand, it’s a product which can be sold to raise funds for charity; on the other hand, it’s a platform for broadcasting any idea. A person buys a T-shirt with a slogan, which he wears all year round — and this slogan is seen by others.
Based on this, we set our goals:
- To raise as much funds as possible for Hearts & Minds and Dr.Klauns;
- To popularize the values of kindness, care and emotional health via slogans and illustrations;
- To inform a wide audience about healthcare clowning, as well as about a new way to support it;
- To expand our audience by this collaboration;
- To elevate our level of customer engagement by creating additional value in our product;
- To add genuine human emotions into our serious financial product;
- To add value to the brand within the team;
- Ultimately, to enjoy the fact that we did something unusual and joyful!
The tasks we set for the merchandise: it should be interesting and appealing both to the audience of Clowndoctors as well as to the clients and employees of Bilderlings.
For this purpose, on the one hand, we were looking for a suitable style — touching, magical, marvelous; on the other hand, we were creating the capsule itself so that it would include both clothing items and technical accessories.
The process was not easy — and that’s normal, as we were doing something like this for the first time. In short, it looked like this:
- Concept: to compile a capsule, write slogans, come up with themes/plots for illustrations;
- Illustrations;
- Vendor search;
- Store creation, integration;
- Marketing and promotion;
- And endless communication with all participants.
As a result we handed over the finished layouts to both organizations and helped them to set up and launch online stores.
To assess the outcomes of the goals we set in numbers is a complicated process. This represents one of the challenges for the next year — to devise metrics that can reflect such tasks.
We did not set sales goals, as this was beyond our control — each organization handled this independently. However, website statistics already show that thousands of people were interested in purchasing. Moreover, many tagged us on social media when buying the merchandise, and that was delightful as a minimum!
A Guide to Corporate Social Responsibility
Idea: To create a simple and accessible guide for businesses which want to become socially responsible.
Why: Firstly, in the last six months, we ourselves have been on this path and have learned many new and non-obvious things. Secondly, we have seen a demand from our business clients — legal entities who would like to undertake a social project but they are either afraid, don’t know how to do it, or are convinced that it requires huge amounts of money.
Goals:
- To increase loyalty among business clients by providing them with useful information.
- To attract a new audience that may potentially come to us due to their interest in this guide.
- To add new attributes to the company’s reputation — we are not only trying to make business socially responsible, but we also share valuable experience with others.
Additional objectives: We wanted to make this project in such a way that it could be easily expanded into something larger or used in the other formats. Since we wanted to meet the Christmas deadline and acted quickly, we chose the simplest and most accessible format — we formatted the text with illustrations into a pdf file, with the expectation that later we could create a separate landing page and/or a thematic “series” on social media from the same material. Additionally, we can expand and supplement it with new sections and promote it to a diverse audience. These are marketing tasks for future growth.
Stickers: A Token of Appreciation
To encourage those of our clients who made donations for Christmas, we prepared a sticker pack for them featuring the images used for the merchandise. It’s just a souvenir, but we see a separate value in it: after all, you don’t usually expect cute, heartwarming stickers as a gift from a bank. For us, it’s an important gesture that we hope is helping to convey the message — we are not a soulless digital platform; we value a human approach, something alive and real.
Furthermore, we also uploaded the same sticker pack to Telegram — for those clients who use the messenger. We didn’t set specific goals, but as an experiment, we looked at the statistics: the stickers were used a total of 157 times. It’s not a huge number, but thanks to it, we saw interest and at the same time, tested Telegram stickers as a marketing tool with specific metrics.
How We Collected Donations
During the Christmas campaign, we talked more about the merchandise, encouraging clients to make purchases. However, there was a noticeable increase in activity with donations: in November, our clients donated 2422.86 euros — almost 4 times more than the previous month, and the highest amount in a single month throughout our project. In total, during the Christmas campaign (October, November, December), we raised 3994.64 euros to support healthcare clowning.
Marketing: How We Promoted Our Projects
We used standard tools: email newsletters, messages in the personal account, the website, social media, and a blog on Medium. And the results are inspiring!
Email newsletters: for the Christmas campaign (October-December), we sent our clients a total of 4 emails on the topic of charity. The average email open rate is 45%, which is a very good indicator for promotional emails from companies!
Think about it: just 4 emails brought in almost 4,000 euros in donations!
Regarding social media, we noticed the following trends: on Facebook, charity-related topics are more popular than on LinkedIn; however, on LinkedIn, these posts have a consistently high engagement rate — meaning that people who view these posts interact with them more actively (liking, sharing, etc.). From this, we can assume that among our followers, the audience interested in social responsibility is smaller than those interested in international payments, but it is more engaged and active.
Mistakes and Lessons Learned: What We Will Do In Different Way Next Time
- Earlier Planning: We will start planning for Christmas campaigns even earlier, possibly considering them as early as the beginning of the year to allow for better preparation and execution.
- Clearer Goal Setting: We will focus on setting even clearer and more specific goals for each aspect of the campaign to ensure we can measure success accurately.
- Improved Communication: We will allocate more time and effort to communication with charitable organizations, understanding their needs and perspectives better to create more effective partnerships.
- Diversified Marketing: Next time, we will diversify our marketing efforts and consider different platforms to reach a wider audience, leveraging our learning from the past campaigns.
- Better Metrics: We will work on defining better metrics to evaluate the impact of our social responsibility initiatives, going beyond just financial contributions to assess broader social and brand value.
- Strengthened Team Collaboration: We will foster stronger collaboration within our team and with our partners to ensure everyone is aligned on the objectives and tasks at hand.
- Adaptability: Recognizing that reality can be different from initial plans, we will build in more flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.
By learning from our mistakes and continuously improving our approach, we aim to make our future social responsibility initiatives even more impactful and successful.
Microclimate Improvement: How the Team Has Changed During the Project
One of the most valuable outcomes of this project is that the majority of ideas came from our team. Colleagues have been coming forward with suggestions and are willing to put in extra effort for charitable initiatives. We take pride in the fact that all the developments for charity were proposed by our IT department!
Some colleagues have started talking about volunteer work, showing interest in healthcare clowning, and discussing assistance more frequently. Many who were initially skeptical about this project now talk about it with pride.
While conversations in the office kitchen might not be considered relevant data, there are indirect signs of change. It seems that colleagues now feel a sense of belonging to the project, bringing them closer together as a team.
