How to design Christmas campaigns that people care about
Designing Christmas campaigns that people care about can get tricky. 2020 has definitely come with more lows than highs. A number of nonprofit donors cut back on budgets due to COVID19, stalling big community projects but Christmas time never fails to bring warm, happy and cheerful memories.
With the marketing world suddenly turning red, green, gold and blue and your email inbox filled with Christmas campaigns, maybe you are wondering where to start and if yours too will stand out from the crowd.
Here are some tips you can use to build a solid campaign that can effortlessly get people involved and go viral on social media.
1. Draw up your Christmas campaign strategy
What’s the plan of action? Drawing up a strategy helps guide you on what you exactly want to achieve (your objectives). Remember that every objective must be SMART stands for: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.
An example of a SMART objective is: To raise $ 20,000 for children’s Christmas gifts within 30 days of launch.
2. Crafting Impactful Content
Now that you know what your goal is, develop key messages that can work for your donors. Think about one of your causes and develop a Christmas message around it, something like what Save the Children does every year to help give kids in need food, be healthy and enjoy their Christmas too.
Save the Children’s Jumper Day in the UK has consistently been successful because it is fun and affordable. It calls on people to sign up on the Save the Children Jumper Day website, make a donation of 2 pounds, and promise to wear a silly looking sweater on a specific day in December.
At the same time, the holiday season is the season of gift-giving and showing appreciation. You can jump on this holiday train by saying thanks to all your loyal customers through exclusive gifts or deals so that it does not feel like it’s a take-take situation all the time. It should instead be a give & take situation.
This obviously applies to you if you run a gift catalogue and even if you don’t, you can run a matching donation campaign.
3. Story-telling
This is the commonest strategy organisations use to create emotive christmas campaign videos. Christmas is about giving out of love. You need an idea good enough to motivate a large number of people to believe in your campaign and give to it.
Check out this Christmas campaign by The Childhood Trust. Their campaign challenges the audience to remember children living in poverty during Christmas time. The theme was “For many of them, Santa doesn’t exist”
After watching this, wouldn’t you want to give any amount you have to the cause?
4. Choosing channels
Decide which channels you’re going to use as well as the frequency of your posts. For example, is your campaign one day or a week, month or even longer? The timeframe really all depends on the spending behaviour of your donors.
Know which platforms work best to push your kind of campaign and maximize them to create as much awareness as possible. I’d advise to always build a cohesive social media plan that pushes your campaign on more than just two platforms.
Email is a must because you can personalize messages to different donor segments but at the same time, the campaign has to be pushed on other social media platforms for purposes of transparency.
5. Sense of urgency
The holidays are a finite time. December is the busiest time for many families as parents are rushing to jump on the crazy discounts on grocery and gifts shopping. There’s a lot of spending being done and this is when you get tactical.
For example, you too could do a sales promotion on your gift catalogue and encourage people to buy within one week. Discounts are hard to resist and people will be more inclined to act quickly if they know it will be gone soon.
6. The #Hashtag
If you expect to run a digital campaign which I assume you must do, create an easy and memorable hashtag that people can easily remember and follow updates. You need as many eyes and ears because the more attention you get, the more donations you can get.
Here’s an example of a brilliant campaign with a simple yet captivating hashtag that got millions of people’s attention in London.
#NotWhoTheyAre by West London Mission is a Christmas campaign the organisation ran last year in November to raise awareness of homelessness and to raise funds to help support people who are living on the streets with the key message – Homeless is what they are, not who they are.
7. Measure your success
If you want to know if your campaign has been successful, you’ll need to measure it. Some of the metrics you can measure are: reach, engagement and donations. As you drive your campaign, metrics act as a guide to evaluate whether your strategies are being successful or need to be revised.
Otherwise, if you wait to measure them after the campaign is done, you’d have cheated yourself. Monitoring and Evaluation should be done at the start, throughout and at the end of the campaign.
Here are some of my personal favorite campaigns that inspired me to act!
- Santa Fe Animal Shelter ran this campaign in 2016 themed “Light the way home” They use storytelling to show the importance of saving dog’s lives and the joy they bring to families.
- #FlowHoHo by Bloody Good Period
Bloody Good Period asked people to send a #FlowHoHo parcel to girls and women who need them. Last year they raised over £17k, which sorted 2,000 periods.
Thanks for reading till the end. We hope these tips have inspired you to create a Christmas campaign yourself!
We love helping brands stand out in the digital space. Get in touch for brilliant marketing campaign ideas and get people into the giving mood early!