Erskine

BACKGROUND
In 2004 Erskine faced serious challenges. Charitable giving was in decline; charities concerning the old or disabled were the least fashionable and the charity was over-reliant on income from legacies.

THE OBJECTIVES

• To increase awareness, particularly in Edinburgh and among younger (35-55) audiences.
  
  
• To increase understanding of what Erskine does.
  
  
• To increase donations

THE INSIGHT
Erskine was something of a “Cinderella” charity – people are most likely to give to charities to do with cancer, with children, with animals. The key emotion that we needed to unlock for Erskine was empathy.

EXECUTION
The campaign focused on outdoor as the key medium (48$ and 6$ posters) but also included press, radio and online.

THE RESULTS

• Spontaneous awareness of Erskine grew dramatically – from 23% to 46% in the West and from only 7% to 33% in the East. Spontaneous awareness by age increased across all sectors, including the younger groups– among 35-44 year olds from 2% to 26%.
  
  
• Understanding of what Erskine does has increased.
  
  
• Claimed donations to Erskine have doubled from 4% to 8%. In the West they have doubled from 7% to 14%; in the East they have gone from 2% to 5%.
  
  
• Hits to the website have gone up more than tenfold over a two year period – the web address has been prominently featured in all material.  And comparing the last quarter of 2004 with the last quarter of 2006, giving via the website has increased by a factor of three.
  
  
• From the start-point of the new marketing initiatives total donations increased from £5.7m to £7.2m. Critically the general donations subset of those donations has reversed a downward trend and has more than doubled from £1.47m in 2003/4 to £3.04m in 2005/6.