We are delighted to learn this week that our client Unicef has been announced as the winner of the Award for Innovation in Fundraising by the Institute of Fundraising for its Paddington Postcards campaign.
Far from being an overnight success, this was the result of intense audience research and some game-changing insight for the Unicef.
Paddington's Postcards originally came about due to organisational (and market) pressure to generate income from new audiences. Further was tasked with helping the team at Unicef conduct research with ‘modern’ families, including same-sex, single-parent and mixed-faith families, and others.
We created a week-long research community, tasking 33 UK families along the way to better understand their attitudes and behaviours towards charitable causes and fundraising, and generate new ideas and concepts for trialling.
Unicef trialled the ideas, but none stuck with the team at the time, so they put the opportunity on hold.
Christmas approached and the targets remained to be met, so the team revisited the research and insight, and came up with a minimum viable product (MVP) that they felt confident in launch to market within a month.
The research told them that families liked to do traditional things at Christmas, like shoe boxing gifts for children, so they created a purely digital version of this called Paddington's Parcels. These monthly packs from Paddington helped children and their parents learn about the world together, bringing new audiences closer to Unicef’s mission to reach every child in danger. They used Paid Social to quickly trial different propositions with different audiences.
The team, led by Anand Modha, worked closely with Vivendi - Talia Lipiec and the license holders to turn this around in just one month. The MVP was launched and revenues beat all expectations.
You can access the full case study for this project here.
If you’d like to find more about how innovation market research and contextual insight can take your fundraising up a notch and generate new concepts then get in touch.