Charity Communications: Brave New World

This session was billed as "An interactive and entertaining session about the opportunities new media offers to charities, for communications and fundraising. A particularly innovative format; inspiring and a little outrageous."

And to be fair, Russell Davies (@russelldavies) - internet marketing guru and columnist at Campaign magazine - lived up to the hype.

Russell started by admitting that he didn't know what charity communications people do and wouldn't pretend to, but he was here to tell us what he tells all the brands he's worked with and hoped we were clever enough to use it in our own way.

The world is getting blurry, e.g. anyone with a camera is considered a journalist. This offers dangers as well as possibilities.

Brands have to get interesting or get useful - preferably both.

For the last 15 years, marketing meant find a message, fine tune that message, then hammer that message home.

Now, marketing has to question how it can get its audience to engage with it. Their messages must have depth, humour, subtlety, irony, anger, romance, excitement, etc, etc...

It's like velcro, which works because it's got loads and loads of hooks. It doesn't matter if they don't all hook, as long as some do.

Russell then showed this Nike advert:



It is effective not because of the message it is delivering, but the way it is communicating. It is bypassing language, as viewers smile an nod along with the music. You can't bash people over the head with your message - your communication needs to be more interesting.

The Run London campaign for Nike was a success because of its usefulness. Feedback suggested that Reebok and Adidas adverts were better, but the Nike campaign helped a lot of people run 10k. This usefulness was more effective in reaching the campaign's target audience.

He then showed us this clip:



There are millions of people out there who are smarter, funnier and better at doing this than you. Organisations need to work in partnership with these people, not ramming the message down their throat.

As an example of this, Russell showed the Nike 'Joga Chain' campaign:



This campaign worked because of the partnership. It wouldn't have worked without the individuals who created the content or without the global reach of the Nike.

Key Lessons:

1. You learn this stuff by doing it, not by viewing it
2. Think quick, small, real
3. You can't control the conversation, but you can build somewhere for the conversation to happen
4. It's not about more powerful machines, it's about more powerful people