The NSPCC as Integrated Marketer
John Grounds, Director of Communications, NSPCC March 2004 Transcript of talk given at the Centre for Integrated Marketing Conference in March 2004 celebrating the award of Integrated Marketer of the Year.
I’m going to talk today about how the NSPCC’s FULL STOP campaign and
appeal have evolved from an original unifying idea into the driver of media
neutral planning at the NSPCC. I’ll also try to describe how we have
addressed the issues raised by integrated communications over the past
five years.
The NSPCC’s marketing and communication had a history of piecemeal
activity throughout the 80s and early 90s but we believe we have now
become an organisation with an integrated, open planning strategy that is
planning 18 months ahead.
Media neutral planning and integrated marketing is something that the
marketing and communications departments of charities are having to
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understand – we are having to behave and think like sophisticated FMCG or
retail marketing departments. And, to a point, some charities are a step
ahead. Primarily this is because they have always understood that their
audiences tend to be much more diverse and require quite different
approaches depending on what response you want from them.
FULL STOP was launched in 1999 following the establishment of a new
organisational strategy. That launch was the peak – up to that point – of
marketing and communications integration.
The FULL STOP campaign was created out of a need to unite the public
AND the NSPCC behind a new shared vision. For many years the NSPCC
had operated on a piecemeal strategy of highly creative, impactful
communications but with no genuine endgame for either themselves or the
audience. This meant that communications were often seen as being an
add on rather than a core part of the NSPCC’s role in society.
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Print work such as this…
…was used to raise awareness of an issue, possibly generate donations
but ultimately they would disappear from the public conscience as soon as
it disappeared from the pages of the newspapers.
A decision was made in 1998 that because the NSPCC had numerous
audiences – public, parents, teachers, child care professionals,
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Government, children and their own staff – we needed a platform that could
unite them all behind what the NSPCC were there to do, what their mission
was – essentially why they existed. This meant that even if you were an MP
or a child in need of help you knew what the NSPCC were there to do and
you shared and bought into the same vision. At this time the concept of
integration, let alone media neutral or open planning was still in its infancy
but this single minded approach to communications was a pre-cursor to
establishing a more sophisticated integrated approach.
Research at the time showed that creating this platform meant enrolling
the public in a message that made them realise what the end-game was
and that everyone had a part to play – this was expressed as ‘Together the
public and the NSPCC can end cruelty to children’. This became ‘Together
we can end cruelty to children. FULL STOP’ and thus the FULL STOP
campaign was born.
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One question often asked of the NSPCC is do we think it was too big a
mission, too fantastical? No, not at all. What would be enough – 50%? If our
mission wasn’t the ending of cruelty then why should the public, parents or
children believe in us? It gave the whole organisation a focus, purpose and
motivation. It also gave the parents, children and the public something to
believe in and be motivated by. It was able to link both in the minds of the
NSPCC staff and the public such diverse elements as the lobbying activity
of our policy department to the fundraising message of our corporate
fundraising team. In short, it became an organsing thought – a unifying
idea.
The primary objective of the new FULL STOP message was to raise
awareness of child abuse and getting people to face up to the reality of its
existence. The Launch campaign aimed to grab the public by the lapels and
shake them out of their ignorance and resistance to the problem of child
cruelty.
The BIG IDEA was to use the power of the public’s imagination to
communicate how we can’t look away from child abuse any more.
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You can see some of the print work here and this is the powerful launch TV
ad.
A shot from ‘Cant’ look’ TV ad:
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This Launch activity also included a national door drop campaign and on-
street activity which urged the public to sign up to the NSPCC pledge to
support the FULL STOP campaign. All these elements shared the thought
that we can’t look away any more. It is a good example of how we have
approached integration throughout the FULL STOP campaign – we look at
the specific objective of the communication and the required response of
the audience and then create communications that can deliver against that
and not simply to put the same visuals or copy across all media. Our
audiences, as we noted earlier, are so disparate that, for example, if we are
running a positive discipline campaign, we can’t talk to a group of parents
and a group of child care professionals in the same language. The
responses we are trying to invoke are quite different – even if the end
result, stopping cruelty to children, is the same.Following the launch
awareness campaign there now needed to be communications that
brought the NSPCC and the public together. Research showed that the
public, although recognising that abuse was an issue, would still rather not
have to deal with it themselves. The NSPCC needed to show that they
weren’t simply standing in a big tower dispensing their thoughts on how
society should change. They needed to create a bond between the public
and themselves so that they could become a trusted source of information
and advice. The Babies Campaign of 2000 aimed to do this with a series of
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communications that showed that the NSPCC understood the difficulties of
parenting and were a credible source of information and advice. Here are
two of the print ads …
…and we can now see two of the TV ads…
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A shot from the TV ad
The campaign was a great success and repositioned the NSPCC from
being synonymous with cruelty and instead aligned them with support,
understanding and empathy for parents. You could visually represent it as
moving from one side of the fence to the other – like this:
From this: Parents NSPCC Cruelty
To this : Parents NSPCC Cruelty
However, the next challenge was to be the most difficult faced so far – to
make the public do something.
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Some feedback on the NSPCC work had been ‘so what do you want me to
do?’. Certainly research had shown that the public were ready to do
something – they just needed the justification or confidence to do it. At the
same time, over the three years that had passed since the launch of FULL
STOP the NSPCC’s communications had started to return to old ways –
piecemeal and disconnected. When I arrived in late 2001, work was just
beginning on a new piece of communication.
The Cartoon Campaign came straight out of the need to provoke action
from the public. The NSPCC and Government research showed that cruelty
was nearly always avoidable if the will was there to stop it. We needed to
provide that motivation for people to do something. And it was going to be
tougher than we thought.
The challenge for the communications was simple – move the British public
from awareness, but impotence, to action. However, the truth was that
while in research people might say they wanted to do something, the reality
was that they were very nervous of reporting suspected abuse. High profile
media stories of wrongly accused child cruelty cases had made the public
very concerned about getting the accusations wrong, they felt nervous
about being outed as the source of the claims and the public also
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questioned the morality of whether it was right to be responsible in splitting
up a family.
The creative breakthrough came through deciding - after research – that
we needed to make the concerns that you might have if you intervene,
irrelevant. Put simply, don’t mention them. Instead, compellingly and
powerfully tell the audience that if they don’t do something children will die.
We needed something that didn’t dwell on the issue of what happens to
you if you don’t do something – instead told you what happens to the child
if you don’t – a far more emotionally rich area.
This breakthrough defined our strategy from there on. It produced a series
of ideas aimed at provoking action, one of which was the idea of using a
Cartoon boy getting beaten and abused by his father to show what really
happens if you don’t do something. Immediately we could see that a
Cartoon allowed us to be more graphic, honest and powerful than ever
before.
The NSPCC felt this was a challenging idea but it was also a BIG IDEA. It
would have been really easy to buy a safer option. But this was a
breakthrough communication. We were hoping to take the public out of
their comfort zone – and asking the public to take such a big step required
all of us having to do the same.
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Interestingly, it was the qualitative research and the internal approval
process at the NSPCC which pointed the way to our next stage of
development.
The Campaign itself ran for 4 weeks. The 60” commercial ran for half that
time then followed by 30” and 10” cutdowns. Alongside this was a 48-sheet
campaign that ran in large conurbations around the country.
A shot from the TV ad:
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The print visual
This was intended to not only reinforce the message that ‘Real Children
Don’t Bounce Back’ but also give the issue gravitas by having an ‘on-street’
presence.
Now this campaign wasn’t just about one ad – the thought of provoking
action and ‘Real Children Don’t Bounce Back’ needed to work across many
media channels. We developed an interactive and digital campaign to run
alongside the main above the line activity.
For our Donors and Campaigners mailings intended for this time, the
message of ‘Real Children Don’t Bounce Back’ was used as the vehicle
from which we could communicate to this audience about the need to
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advertise and raise funds to help end cruelty to children. Here is some of
this material.
We integrated the idea into the PR campaign as well. For example we put
together an alliance with The Sun that gave us a wonderful launch piece.
And, inevitably, the campaign created a great deal of debate. The Daily
Express ran a story headlined ‘Is this the sickest ad you’ve ever seen?’.
Two days later their letters page published the public’s response…
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There were none in agreement with The Express’ stance.
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The campaign’s effectiveness was of course, the most important element
in our minds. Outstanding creative that is fresh and genuinely different and
superbly integrated through the line only becomes outstanding
communications if it achieves the results you need. The Cartoon campaign
did just that.
First, calls to the NSPCC Helpline rose by 100%. Second, the tracking
results, run through NOP, showed that:
• 77% thought that the campaign would make them more likely to call
the NSPCC for advice if they thought a child was being abused.
• 88% agreed that the campaign would make people more aware of
the need to do something
We also had letters and emails of support from members of the public –
some of whom had been moved to report abuse and some who just wanted
to say how powerful they thought the campaign was.
The campaign idea is about ending cruelty to children by motivating the
public to do something. But, as we said earlier, the overall Mission to end
cruelty to children encompasses many issues – child deaths, supporting
parents, physical punishment, someone to turn to for every child. While
FULL STOP continued to provide our unifying idea, it was clear we needed
to move on. Media neutral planning was the logical next step.
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To ensure we were true to the central campaign idea, whilst dealing
effectively with the range of secondary themes and the specific needs and
interests of communications, fundraising, lobbying and service provision,
we introduced the concept of milestones.
This was quite a straightforward idea – demonstrate the value of media
neutral planning and integrated execution by results. With a limited budget
it di not take much persuasion to convince people that we would achieve a
bigger bang for our buck by concentrating our spend over two or three
milestone activities each year. Having achieved concensus on this it was
short step to genuinely open planning.
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Shots from Babies & Toddlers TV ad
Integration can, of course, take many forms – it is not necessarily a simple
main visual being shared across all the materials – that is replication rather
than integration. In fact it should be a central core idea or strategy
executed differently across the relevant media. Our objective is always to
maximise the desired response from the audience – not simply to make
sure the same visuals were seen in every audience touchpoint. Consumer
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or audience touchpoints are the key to understanding media neutral
planning and integration – we need to be able to understand how each
touchpoint affects the nature of the message and the campaign idea. For
example, our idea of ‘Supported Parents Means Safer Children’ which was
the platform for our 2003 Babies & Toddlers milestone, was very
empathetic on a broadcast level using communications that showed the
NSPCC understood the difficulties of parenting - but the brochures and
face to face activity had more direct advice, support and tips on parenting.
Growing our integrated capabilities will be a key ongoing focus for us and
our Agencies. It requires ideas that can work in every media and the
determination and vision to make them work.
So how have we achieved this? Well, we are still developing and striving to
improve but we now have an established open process which is helping us
to achieve more effective, integrated communication. Media neutral
planning begins with the audiences for whom the communication is
intended. We begin by addressing the range of audiences within the scope
of the activity – donors, parents, children, campaigners, the government,
etc. A good deal of open thinking goes on in advance of preparation of a
brief, involving a range of internal departments and external agencies.
When a brief is written, it is referred to as an ‘interagency and cross-
functional brief’. It is the master brief for the milestone and applies equally
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to all those involved in delivery. The brief is presented – usually by me – to
all agencies and internal functions. The most recent briefing was delivered
to nearly 50 people. Agencies and departments then use the master brief to
create specific briefs for their own teams, but the talking starts
immediately through fully open relationships, inter-agency and inter-
function, so that the response to the brief is delivered by everybody
involved, to everybody involved – not in a series of separate unconnected
sessions which must be stitched back together later.
Integrated delivery is also supported by a further example of open structure
and open relationships, a ‘milestone implementation group’ comprising
representatives from all parties meeting fortnightly to ensure delivery is on
track.
Results are shared, evaluation pooled and lessons learned together for the
next milestone.
In parallel – ultimately giving a stronger foundation for future integration
and confidence in our media neutral planning – we have conducted a full
brand review, produced a new brand guide and engaged the organization
and agency in its delivery. We have also carried out a five-year strategy
review of the FULL STOP strategy, with all agencies and members of staff
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(2000 of them) having the opportunity to be involved in the shaping of the
NSPCC’s future.
This review has given an even clearer focus to communications planning
and was a major factor in the success of our recent someone to turn to
milestone.
Our most recent milestone – someone to turn to for every child, has been
the best example yet of the process coming together.
So we now have an established process for media neutral planning – but
we need to improve further. It is still hardest of all to tie donor
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communications and public education work closer together. And the full
integration of evaluation still has a way to go before we can consider it to
be perfect. The next step here is to engage evaluation and polling agencies
earlier in the process.
The FULL STOP Campaign and our milestone communications have
combined a shared vision and powerful ideas across many subject areas
and through the line. This has been able to unite our varied audiences and
the organization itself behind one clear mission, in terms of the FULL
STOP message, but also behind diverse platforms as you’ve seen with our
wide range of campaigns.
We will continue in trying to create the most powerful unifying creative
ideas possible within the FULL STOP umbrella - not as an end in itself but
as a means in changing public behaviour. The challenge for us and our
Agencies is being able to get the most out of these ideas through genuinely
open planning and open evaluation.
And it is that that will determine how successful we are in contributing to
bringing an end to cruelty to children forever.
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