St Mungo's

Attracting a younger audience for St Mungo’s

#Acquisition #Charity #Strategy

Winter: love it or loathe it, we can all take solace in the fact that it’s a season when we can cosy up at home and wait for freezing weather to blow over. But that’s not the case for people living on the streets.

For homelessness charity St Mungo’s, the Christmas and winter period is a crucial time for gathering donations

Entering Q4 of 2021, donations remained buoyant. But as ever, attracting new supporters remained a key priority. The charity recognised that with consistent support among 35+ age group, they needed to attract donors from a younger age bracket to boost the diversity of their income.

Reaching two different audiences called for a strategic two-phased approach

With the primary goal to generate donations over the Christmas and winter periods, and the secondary goal to attract new supporters in the 25 – 34 age brackets, we decided to roll out a two-phased approach.

Phase one primed the audience using awareness-led routes without a direct ask, giving them a chance to connect with the cause. Phase two then scooped up the audience who had engaged with the phase one creative and targeted them with a direct ask. Non-engagers were stripped out after hitting frequency caps and awareness raising content was switched out for engagement driving content which converted to a hard ask.

The multi-channel campaign primarily took the form of organic and paid social posts across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as digital display ads.

Working with St Mungo’s on this campaign was an opportunity to refresh the charity’s core winter messaging and establish brand awareness and trust amongst a whole new demographic. This is an important way for charities to remain relevant to new donors whilst retaining the trust of those who have already established support.

– – Steve Davis, Managing Partner, Flourish

Our creative brought home the harsh reality of spending winter out on the streets

With St Mungo’s being one of the only homelessness charities that welcomes dogs into its shelters, it was clear that furry friends should remain central to the campaign.

st mugos-charity-fundraising-flourish-bristol

Focussing the creative around keeping best friends together using #EveryoneIsWelcome, we were able to appeal to the established audience and also attract interest from a younger target audience – using the bond between pet and owner as a bridge into the topic of homelessness.

With this hook, we were also able to attract the attention of animal lover, dog owner and comedy royalty Adam Buxton who gave three appeal shout outs to St Mungo’s on his eponymous podcast, securing us a significant number of donations. We were able to identify 152 donations that are 100% attributed to the podcast, which totalled over £10k of donations kindly given to this great cause.

 

65%

increase in conversion for the 18-24 age group

96%

increase in conversion for the 25-34 age group

34% more 18–34-year-olds are now supporting St Mungo’s

Our new routes to target a younger audience saw the conversion rate within these age ranges shoot up 34% compared to the previous year. The 18 –24 age group saw a 65% increase in conversion, whilst the 25 – 34 age group leapt up by 96%.

Despite the challenges of sourcing appropriate imagery to use in a post-Covid world, and the need to massage messaging to work both in the lead up to Christmas and afterwards, the campaign has been a great success. We equalled the Winter 2020 campaign total a full three weeks before the 2021 campaign activity was scheduled to finish.

To learn more about how Flourish could help unlock new audiences in your next campaign, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Marketing and Business Development Manager Aimee Blakemore.

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