harvest digital

Care International has appointed us to launch its first comprehensive digital strategy. The charity aims to recruit more monthly donors though the internet to help Care International’s child welfare programme.

One of the world’s largest aid agencies, Care International works with children in the developing world that are suffering and dying needlessly. It aims to register people to give regular donations of ten pounds which it will use to provide essentials like clean water, decent food and education.

We have produced a variety of creative advertising in multiple formats including some with video streaming of a child helped by Care International, Malita from Zambia. Banners feature Malita with copy stating ‘Every 5 seconds a child dies from hunger. You can stop this. All it takes is a click of your mouse to save a child like Malita from poverty.’ We built a landing page that viewers click through to, www.careforthechild.org.uk, which streams a video of an interview with Malita describing how she has benefited from the charity’s support. Visitors can click through to make a regular donation of ten pounds to care for a child. Every six months, Care International sends all donors an email from Malita highlighting the effectiveness of the work they are supporting.

The online display advertising is targeted at a broad range of donors and is supported by an integrated media campaign to extend Care International’s reach across the internet and drive response. This combines search engine marketing on Yahoo!, MSN, Google and affiliate marketing on the buy.at network with email marketing and online display advertising.

Tracy Horner, Head of Donor Marketing at Care International said ‘More than 120 million people in Africa are living permanently on the edge of emergency, but it doesn’t cost much to change their entire lives. We wanted to increase our online activity to reach these donors and selected Harvest Digital to produce the digital strategy because of their experience in the sector and because they bring a creative approach to integrating digital media.’

William Corke, Director at Harvest Digital, adds, ‘Care International was using Google Adwords to drive people to their site but we recommended a more far-reaching strategy combining several different digital media channels and producing rich and engaging creative in order to rapidly gain a wide range of learnings that we can use to effectively grow Care’s use of digital marketing. ‘This creative provides real examples of the people that have been helped by Care and describes how the donations will be put to use which increases donations through all the channels. This means more children can receive regular care.’

The creative is produced in several formats including emails, banners for affiliates and streaming video, which highlight key facts such as ‘£10 pays for a class of children to each have their own pencil and exercise book’ and ‘£22 will pay for a teacher’s salary for a month so that AIDS orphans can enjoy a free education.’ Visitors can offer the £10 on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. The media and creative will be optimised to ensure the campaign delivers regular donors for Care International.