Our first campaign for the university of Birmingham saw us tackling one of the biggest challenges facing mankind: the impending failure of antibiotics.
Data insights were crucial for this project. We began with a cross-campaign performance review and discovered there was a hardcore of active alumni who were giving to both Student Support and Medical Research appeals. The success of each campaign was dependent on activating additional cohorts, and strongly resonating with particular academic schools and even degree subjects in some cases.
With the knowledge that we had to activate 2 distinct audiences – student sympathisers and technical specialists – we created a pack which explained the details of the science and carried a sense of wonder that this world-changing work was being led by a small team of PhD students whose potential had been unlocked by a Birmingham educator. We also used signs and signifiers that would be familiar to those with a science background, designing the initial pack to look like a project report and nodding to PhD posters in our reminder pack.
This connected alumni to the students within the research team, without dumbing-down the science. We made sure that data selections were smart and that the inactive segments were populated with graduates from the schools & subjects most likely to donate. We also drove responses online through a series of crafted emails that resonated with the key DM execution and a landing page that continued the design and key messages.