Compassion in World Farming
Caring about what happens to animals before we eat them used to be a bit of a ‘fringe’ concern. Now, thanks to rising awareness and the support of TV chefs such as Hugh, Jamie and even a little bit of Gordon, it’s a mainstream one. This was the perfect opportunity for Compassion in World Farming – the only charity specialising in tackling factory farming – to advertise and build awareness over the week of Channel 4’s ‘Great British Food Fight’. But they but wanted to put a cost-efficient infrastructure in place to build awareness and support into the future.
The approach
As well as traditional advertising methods such as press ads, a cold DM pack and banner ads, we looked to develop an online PR strategy covering social networking and blogging. We started by profiling a range of potential audiences – animal lovers, foodies, people interested in health issues and so on. Specific and relevant messages were targeted at these defined groups.
Going Social
Compassion in World Farming had already made a start in social media with Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. A unified social media strategy was now needed to ensure the organisation’s whole online presence was speaking with the same voice. Our objectives were to increase awareness, drive visits to the Compassion website and recruit new supporters. To maintain consistency and above all authenticity, we assigned a social media manager who was particularly sympathetic to the cause. Beth underwent brand immersion with the client before taking responsibility for Twitter activity, blogger outreach, forum posting, Facebook Page optimisation and management, Flickr optimisation and management (account and photos), YouTube optimisation and management (account and videos) and Wikipedia editing.
What's good about it?
This was a finite project. But we’ve armed Compassion with the knowledge and tools to become highly active in the social spaces where its current and future supporters spend time. And because the project was so measurable, we were able to provide Compassion with a strong case for continuing its investment in social media. Since the project began, there has been a 403% increase in pageviews via social media referrals (in comparison to previous social media referrals) Visitors via social media spent 45% longer on the Compassion site than the average visitor There were blog or forum posts on over 20 influential sites On Yahoo Image Search, Compassion’s images now come up on the first page for various key search terms Over 1,500 Twitter followers gained (7,500% increase) Over 70 mentions by the Twitter community Over 4,000 new Facebook Fans (133% increase) Click throughs from Wikipedia have increased over 700% 50% of people clicking the Facebook Ads went on to become Fans Visit Compassion in World Farming on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. A detailed slideshow of this case study is available on SlideShare
.
