I saw an intriguing link on Facebook that @artfulcharlie had shared:
And I was curious enough to know what I might look like in ten years' time (actually, I think, in retrospect, I probably didn't want to know!), but probably more so to see how it was done. I also immediately imagined this was a charity campaign, not just because the person sharing it is a charity copywriter and interested in charity campaigns but because it sounded like it should be one, so I wanted to see what it was all about, because I'm interested in that kind of thing too.
As I just went to take a screenshot of Charlie's post just now, I noticed that it did actually include the name of the charity in the graphic it pulled in - but I have to confess that I totally missed it at the time. I'm going to imagine that, if I missed it, there are going to have been plenty of other people that did the same, because the likelihood it was just me is fairly slim.
Anyway, so I went through to the next step - the app - without knowing who was behind the campaign and never was any the wiser, because the charity logo never makes an appearance. Not once:
I also later realised that I'd left mid-app, after adjusting the picture, not realising there was anything more after that. I only went back through the app a second time to check I hadn't missed the charity name (N.B. for the purposes of this post - most people aren't going to do this) and, in doing so, found there was more:
- You are offered the chance to save the photo of yourself (I'm not quite sure why you would)
- After that, there is a 'more info' link that brought up a screen with - a-ha! - the charity's URL at the very bottom.
But, before I did this, I put the first part of the app's URL - dryjanuary.org.uk - into my browser to see whether there was a wider campaign associated with the app, because you would expect there to be (N.B. the average person probably wouldn't bother doing this, so they would probably never find out, if their user journey started like mine did, on Facebook). And there was - here's the above the fold bit of the microsite I arrived at:
This campaign may have been intended as a soft sell - a strategy to get the charity's name out there surreptitiously alongside some attention-grabbing content. Perhaps someone someone thought that obvious charity branding might be off-putting or that people wouldn't want to engage with a charity that helps those 'harmed through alcohol misuse'? That kind of suggestion is made all the time, often on the thinnest of suppositions but, even if it were true, surely you'd make sure the charity's name and mission was unmissable in the user journey once a certain level of engagement had been established and that it was properly branded? That's what logos are for, afterall - to catch the eye and make an impact.
I think, in this case, it's a real opportunity missed for that (not particularly well-known) charity to let people know it exists and find out more about its work. The microsite tells us over 4,000 people have signed up to this campaign though - a pretty impressive number - so they must be doing a few things right. Although it's not clear how effective this is as a fundraising activity (if, indeed, that is the primary objective) and I'd love to get my hands on this, because there are all sorts of things I think would improve it.
If it wasn't already so late, I'd sketch out my user journey, because it was so around the houses and illustrates the kinds of things to watch out for when planning multi-platform campaigns. Maybe tomorrow.
