JDRF UK

Integrated digital acquisition campaign

Developing new relationships with hard-to-reach audiences.

Inspiring stories

Uploaded, read and shared

JDRF’s mission is to create a world without type 1 diabetes, by funding research to cure, treat and prevent the disease. However, one of the big challenges for the charity is to reach adults living day-to-day with the disease, who may simply not be aware of the support on offer, or the life changing research funded by the charity through donations. The challenge was clear, and the agency’s strategic team set about creating a long-term engagement mechanic, delivered in 3 phases to bring the charity closer to its primary audience.

Type 1 is an often-misunderstood condition. So, living with type 1 can be tough sometimes, especially when people around you might not understand it. But type 1 diabetes isn’t life limiting, and who better to give a positive message of support to people feeling down than someone who knows how they are feeling.

Orna Joseph, Head of Brand and Marketing, JDRF UK

From co-creation to launch

Following a lively ideation workshop with the JDRF team to identify communication territories, propositions and hooks, both teams unanimously settled on a single idea for the first phase of engagement. This was ‘InspiraT1on’ and it asked adults with type 1 diabetes to upload and share stories of what inspires them with other people who may be newly diagnosed or just having a tough time. A digital marketing campaign across Search, Display and Social brought new audiences into the dedicated InspiraT1on microsite. The campaign reached more than 350,000 people with 10,000 of those either uploading, sharing or reading the stories.

Value exchange

Test and learn

For phase 2 of the campaign, a 6-week rolling test programme was devised to understand how effective different types of content would be in driving key actions. Only those who interacted with the engagement campaign were retargeted. Content included a promotion for a free copy of the charity’s magazine, an educational piece about JDRF’s DiaDigits calculator and a piece on Smart Insulin research, which gave an opportunity to talk about fundraising to this new warm audience. The conclusion: whilst each ad served a different purpose and helped build a rounder profile of the charity, a linear approach was not the answer, it was time to up the game for phase 3.

Content marketing

Long-term engagement model

For phase 3, the agency designed a rolling digital marketing campaign featuring ‘hero’ content to generate engagement spikes, closely aligned with the charity’s comms and marketing calendar. Those who responded to the hero content, were removed from that part of the campaign and then remarketed using similar evergreen content from phase 2 (based on learnings), designed to drive opt-in to communications. Finally, redesigned email templates provided a structured content journey for those newly opted-in to received email updates from the charity.

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