Encouraging a new audience to give
The Challenge
Covid-19, global economic downturn, cuts to aid funding, rising operational costs...Save the Children was facing a perfect storm and needed to find new funding streams fast. One potential audience, men without children, offered some hope, but preconceived assumptions about their needs, attitudes and aspirations, meant the charity was failing to encourage this group to become active regular donors.
The Outside-in Perspective
Using digital ethnography, we sought to understand what motivates a highly diverse group of men without children to give to charity and to international development charities focused on children. What we discovered challenged Save the Children’s long-held assumptions.
The Insight
We discovered that most men are looking for new forms of masculinity. They don’t seek to be heroes; they want to be collaborators. While they don’t have children of their own, they enjoy meaningful relationships with children in their lives – as uncles, brothers, cousins, godfathers. Their values closely aligned with those of Save the Children, and they were keen to support their work. But they have never been asked and have never been engaged in relevant ways.
The Solution
With this new audience identified, Save the Children needed the right tools to drive meaningful engagement.
We worked with the target audience and Save the Children’s Innovation and Insights team to co-create a new fundraising product, developed a pipeline of fundraising concepts to feed into future innovations and reduce the time to take products to market and created communication guidelines to ensure that in a highly competitive market, Save the Children earns more decisions to donate or raise funds for them.