The brief

As a charitable organisation, Starship Foundation exists through the generosity of its donors and supportive organisations in the community who lovingly donate money and/or time to assist in making Starship a world class medical facility, however, there are so many charities in today’s market, it’s cluttered and noisy, and donors have little time to take the plunge to donate.

Our brief was to use the power of emotive social media to pull on the heartstrings of Kiwis to drive understanding of Starship, and build a database of an engaged audience who Starship could use for future campaigns to entice donations.

 

The work

Creatively we needed to stand out. Our content had to be video-based to ensure we could utilise social media retargeting tools to capture those engaged. We also needed to recruit talent who could bring our story to life in an emotive, fun, and positive way.

We know the best way to connect with audiences online is by creating emotive content which touches on the hearts and minds of our audience. People flock to social media for positive interactions, two-way conversations and connection. Inside Starship – our weekly social media video series was born to connect with the hearts, minds, and wallets of our audience. We knew in order to be successful, it had to:

• Be fun, positive, full of love, tug on our collective heartstrings…
• Hero the Starship kids themselves and have them front and centre…
• It HAD to have a twist, setting aside our content from the thousands of other messages in our newsfeeds…

To ensure our content was engaging enough to build our remarketing audience, we tipped  the typical interview format on its head. Our  content series shined a light on kids as we see THEM being the interviewers. Armed with a clipboard and questions, Doctors, Play Specialists, Nurses, Caregivers, Sports Therapists, Radiologists are asked the hard and fast questions with topics ranging from past hospital experiences, favourite parts of their jobs, superpowers, movie characters, fears and life advice such as “what’s one thing that all kids should know?”

The onscreen banter touched on heartstrings far and wide, making our audiences laugh, cry, and provide insights into what Starship really is all about. It build human connections in the digital world encouraging people to open their wallets and donate to the very special cause and the people it supports.

 

The outcome

We created 22 videos highlighting our Starship Kid heroes and with touch-points across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube; adhering to an ‘always on’ strategy where viewers look forward to weekly bursts of activity. We were then able to capture those who engaged with our content into our remarketing audience. This database was then used to push out stronger ‘donation-led’ messaging.

Off the back of the successful social series, we built a much larger audience pool of 170,000 New Zealanders to re-market to with donation messaging.  

Our remarketing and Inside Starship content was successful at driving traffic through to site and we found that people were more likely to engage with donation driving content that’s related to our Insider Starship series than standard donation messaging.