Through-the-line Campaign | CSI Drive | Purpose-led Awareness Marketing
For 6 years, Wimpy has been a proud supporter of Slipper Day: Reach For A Dream’s largest annual fundraising campaign. In 2020, due to lockdown restrictions, Slipper Day was cancelled. This meant that many children fighting life-threatening illnesses had their dreams put on hold.
Challenge
During the pandemic, normal restaurant operations were restricted and the economy was at an all-time low, meaning that most South Africans experienced financial difficulties. All of Reach For A Dream’s Slipper Day partners chose not to support this initiative during this time and even Wimpy, who had to close all of its restaurants for the majority of lockdown, considered pulling out.This is where we, Wimpy’s digital agency, decided to step in. We realised the importance of being a purpose-led brand, especially during a pandemic, and the importance of the work that Reach For A Dream was doing. They give hope to those who need it the most. We wanted to play our part in making a difference, so we took on the challenge to create a Wimpy campaign that would support Reach For A Dream, in the midst of a global pandemic, asking consumers to donate money during an unprecedented economic disaster – all while working with an exceptionally tight budget.
Solution
The key was to make this a fully-integrated, digitally-led campaign that got the message out there and made it easier for consumers to donate. First, we built a state-of-the-art online donation portal on the Wimpy website, which doubled up as our content hub and the end goal of the consumer journey. Considering the economic circumstances, our communication needed to be emotive.
WE FOCUSED ON THE CHILDREN’S STORIES TO HUMANISE THE INITIATIVE
and drove the message that ‘Dreams Can’t be Locked Down’.
We also reached out to agency partners (for both Wimpy and Reach For A Dream), to create a through-the-line campaign to drive awareness and engagement from the widest possible audience. We launched the campaign on social media and digital platforms with TV and radio partnerships becoming available through contacts with Reach For A Dream. On social, we introduced our audience to the children by telling their stories and then used TVC, radio, and OOH billboards to drive people to interact with us online. We also updated all of Wimpy’s 467 restaurant webpages with Slipper Week content and all of our creative had a strong call to action that drove people to the donation page on the Wimpy website. We even had celebrity influencers who shared our content and showed off their ‘Slipper Selfies’ to lend their support for this cause; this helped to drive exposure and reach.
Results
In just two weeks, and despite the challenges we were facing, we managed to make
R236 000 raised in the two-week donation drive
166 470 organic social media impressions
3 228 organic engagements
11 153 organic digital video views
227% increase in website traffic month-on-month (67 506 page views)
631% increase in website traffic, compared year-on-year
7 697 users to the donation portal
26.6% conversion rate (Industry benchmark is 17%)
