How we reached 16.3 million people in just 4 week
for a Mother’s Day campaign
THE BRIEF
Mother’s Day is one of thortful’s biggest calendar events and this year the UK’s favourite greeting card company launched an initiative to give back. They donated 5p from every Mother’s Day card sold and £5 of every rainbow bouquet of flowers to NHS Charities Together, with the aim to raise a target of £110,000. thortful came to SBPR with the brief to announce the charity partnership to press, increase brand awareness, and drive sales for Mother’s Day.
THE CHALLENGE
Mother’s Day is a crowded space, so we needed to do something that cut-through the noise from other brands. The link between Mother’s Day and the NHS isn’t a clean-cut one so our messaging needed to be simple, and we needed an activation that was quick to get off the ground with only 4 weeks until the big day.
Another challenge we faced during the campaign was fighting for column inches with the news agenda being heavily focused on Harry and Meghan’s interview, Piers Morgan leaving This Morning and the devastating news of Sarah Everard.
THE SOLUTION
We devised a creative campaign idea which celebrated the NHS as the ‘Mother of the Nation’ - after all, it has been the one picking us up, comforting us and looking after us through the pandemic and our lives in general.
We compiled a press release announcing the partnership between thortful and NHS Charities Together and pitched it to press. We then conducted research to support the campaign by surveying 2,000 respondents to find out what mums really wanted this year, how many people thought the NHS played a motherly role, and how much we appreciated our mums.
We enlisted a celebrity to front the campaign who was both a mum and had a link to the NHS – Deborah James, an inspirational mother-of-two living with bowel cancer. Deborah was our spokesperson for the campaign and announced the survey results to press. We pitched Deborah for exclusive interview opportunities to journalists and organised a broadcast day to secure live and pre-recorded interviews of Deborah who was able to talk about her own experience with the NHS and how it has played a motherly role to her throughout her cancer treatment, as well as promoting thortful’s campaign.
THE OUTCOME
In just one month we secured 30 pieces of coverage for thortful, which reached a potential 13.5 million people and has a value of over £353,000! Titles included: MailOnline, Sunday Express, Express.co.uk, Independent, The Sun Newspaper, Sun Online, Daily Star, UK Fundraising and MSNUK. Coverage achieved also contained 20 backlinks to the thortful website.
The Broadcast Day with Deborah James resulted in 72 items of broadcast coverage reaching a potential 2.8 million people. Stations included: Leeds Local TV, Northern Visions TV, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio Cornwall, BBC Radio Leeds, BBC Radio Oxford, Radio Essex, BBC Radio Northampton, and Voice FM.
In total we achieved 102 pieces of coverage, reached a potential 16.3 million people and the final amount raised for NHS Charities Together exceeded the target at £130,126.50!