Today, everyone wants to make socially responsible business, but often they don’t know how to approach it. We did and want to share the results of launching a social project with zero budget for direct donations, engaging customers and contributing to a valuable cause.
Step 1: Idea: how to choose, who to support and how to support
In winter we learnt about hospital clowning. It’s a kind of art therapy: clown doctors come to visit children in hospital to help them through play to cope with stress and get better faster. One of the colleagues told us that there was such a movement, and some other colleague remembered that clown doctors once helped his child. And we decided to support them in some way.
We explored who was dealing with this and chose two organisations: one British and one Latvian. We got in touch and started to think what we could do for them. A lot of things were not obvious!
Here are the conclusions we came to:
- charities need and value not only money;
- informational support can be more valuable than donations themselves;
- small but systematic help is more important than the big and a random one;
And also: you should choose those organizations that coincide with you in spirit and values. There is a stereotype that financial organizations are comprised in people wearing strict suits with stern faces. Yes, we work with money. But we value humanism, human beings as an individual and his emotions. That’s why we support the guys who care about the emotions of little patients.
Step 2: How you can help when there is no budget
As the desire to support clown doctors was spontaneous, we had no separate budget “for charity” at that time. So the first step was to make an information campaign.
In particular:
- we launched a separate webpage with the info about hospital clowning;
- we set up a blog on Medium specifically on this very subject;
- we organized weekly newsletters on Fridays with stories about clown doctors and charity in general;
- we made a banner and push notifications inside the mobile app;
- we made a series of social media posts about clown doctors.
Soon almost the whole team got involved in the project: everyone proposed some idea, so the next step was just a technological one.
Step 3: In-App Donations: a technological solution for donations
Next, everything went one by one. Our guys made a separate section in the personal account and in the mobile app: “Good Deeds”. It was assumed that a person would make donations from there.
Then we realized that it was unnecessary movement for our clients and decided to simplify: we simply made a “Donate” button right inside the personal account/mobile app. It’s really a donation in two clicks!
And the second click is to choose the organization. You don’t need to do anything else (just to confirm the payment). We have never seen a more convenient feature for charity: usually you have to go to some section inside your personal account and there you have to search and choose something else.
And now we have recurring payments, and that is exactly what any charity organization needs: regular monthly donations. But it is not enough to do this — it is also important to tell the right story. That’s what we’re working on now!
Step 4: Promotions: marketing, sales, community
In June we organized two campaigns.
First one: the company paid for one day of work of clown doctors — Children’s Day. It was important for the company itself.
Second one: “Warm June” campaign — account opening and maintenance was free of charge for the whole month, plus for each new client we paid 5 euros to Clown Doctors, as well as 1 euro for each repost.
Totals 1: what it brought to charitable organizations
In short, two main gains are people and money.
People (*people are our customers. Below we will give statistics on their engagement with this content to make it clearer):
- we learnt that there is such a problem: the emotional state of the children, who are staying in the hospitals, affects the course of their treatment;
- we learnt how this problem can be solved — and which organizations are doing it.
- we learnt how these organizations can be supported: i.e. not only by the money!
In general, speaking the language of marketing, we warmed up the audience.
Money: 6072.12 euros in total were donated to Clown Doctors (in total to both organizations; donations from clients and campaign) between April and June.
Outcome 2: engagement
We sensed customer interest in the charity’s theme from day one! Managers received emails asking how they could support Clown Doctors (when there was no ‘Donate’ button yet).
Now when there is a button, we can track the donation dynamics, and it’s growing every day. The number of donations is growing, the number of donators is growing, and some people started to donate more often (i.e. the same person starts to donate more often).
Then, we analysed the data on newsletter openings and social media posts and compared how audience responds to charity-related topics and business-related topics. Here are the results:
- email newsletters: both topics are in the same range;
- in-person mailings: the average interest rate for charity topic is 10% higher than for business topics;
- publications in social networks on the “Charity” topic by all indicators (coverage, reactions, average, minimum, maximum) — everywhere “Charity” arouses at least 10% more interest than business topics;
- the number of new subscribers (three-month in average) since the charity campaign started has increased: by 60% on Facebook, by 53% on Instagram, by 5.3% on Linkedin.
NB: we were not doing any paid advertising campaigns, all new subscribers, reactions, reaches are organic.
Results 3: PR
And there were several media publications about the campaign, which is also important!
Results 4: Clients and community
We didn’t set any specific business goals; we didn’t set any tasks, but desires — we wanted to attract a new audience, people who share our values, and to form not a “customer database” but a community of like-minded people.
It is still impossible to assess how successful we performed: we need more time.
The number of new clients who came to us during the campaign does not differ much from the previous months — but this does not mean that the campaign did not work. It means that there is something to work on!
And what is worth working on?
We saw interest in the promotion (by the number of conversions from the banner ad to the site), but the conversion rate was low, and we found the reason: the webpage. Customers from the banner were not directed to the form for opening an account, but to the page dedicated to the whole charity project. Conclusion: next time we should take our time and devote more time to it. After all, the main thing is that there is interest!
And a couple of other conclusions
Firstly, we realized that our clients are people with big hearts, and this is priceless! And secondly, today everyone wants to make business “socially responsible”, but it only really makes sense when you do whole-heartedly, ‘because’ of love and it should be based on shared values.
