Fundraising for Marie Curie
“We’ll support everybody to have the best possible end of life experience, no matter their culture, race, religion, sex, gender, sexuality or disability.”
(Marie Curie, n.d.)
#CareForAll
Marketing Campaign
Through our marketing campaign, we aimed to reach both the University of Bath student community, as well as the local Bath population. As such, we leveraged online and offline marketing techniques to reach the community, firstly to inform them of our planned events and generate buzz, and then to remind and convince, with the goal of maximizing attendance and donations thereby maximizing funds raised. In our client brief we were instructed to focus mainly on fundraising instead of spreading awareness as Marie Curie is already quite well known locally; as such, most of our marketing materials focused on our events instead of sharing information about the charity. Moreover, due to their recognition, we could leverage the Marie Curie name and logo to better attract audiences to donate or attend our events.
In line with Marie Curie’s vision and drivers to provide care for people regardless of their background so that everyone can have a good end-of-life experience (Marie Curie, n.d.), we created the hashtag #CareForAll. This was consistently used in all our marketing materials to clearly and impactfully communicate to our audiences what we stand for and what cause they will be helping through their contributions.
Our Strategy
As Instagram is widely used among our target audience (Statista, 2022), the majority of our marketing communications was on this platform on an account we created, MarieCurie_UniofBath. We chose this name not only as it is clear which organizations we are affiliated with, but also as it matches the naming format of other Marie Curie social media accounts, therefore making it more easily recognizable by Marie Curie followers. Moreover, we used Marie Curie’s colours in all our posts to be more consistent with their brand, thereby allowing our posts to be more easily linked to the charity, which is especially beneficial due to their strong reputation in the UK.
We also tagged Marie Curie’s official accounts so that they could share our posts on their page and stories, thereby ensuring we reach their existing online audience. Team members and the SU Instagram also resharing posts to stories further helped increase awareness of our page and events. Finally, we included the link for event ticket sales and donations in our Instagram bio to facilitate buying and/or donations from our audiences.
Overall, we had a posting schedule of four to five posts per week, resulting in a total of seventeen posts created from the start to the end of our marketing campaign. This is in line with statistics from McLachlan and Cohen (2021) that report that the best frequency is three to seven posts per week as it results in higher reach, engagement, and conversions. In addition to this, building a regular cadence is one of the essential factors to have increased impressions, as such, we consistently posted either at 11am or 5pm.
To market our online donation platform on JustGiving, we mainly leveraged personal networks via WhatsApp to reach audiences and, moreover, employed our contacts to share our page with their networks, therefore increasing our reach. That said, we also promoted this page on Instagram; in these posts our message mainly revolved around what Marie Curie does and who benefits from their services to have an informational and emotional appeal to encourage donations (Homer, 2021; Kamatham et al., 2021).
Regarding our Raffle Contest, firstly, we leveraged our Instagram page to advertise the Raffle and prizes in an attempt to spread awareness. As such, a focus of these posts was the prizes that participants could win if they enter the competition.
That said, for the raffle we did not expect high levels of online engagement which is why we leveraged personal selling on two separate days, targeting University of Bath students and using a freebie incentive with food. On these days, we sent messages on student WhatsApp groups to let people know we were at certain convenient locations where we would be giving away free food to anyone who buys a raffle ticket. On the first day we went to student accommodation block lobbies and posted on the respective accommodation group chats to inform students that we were there. The second day we went to The Virgil Building to target students working on assignments; for this we posted on the general student WhatsApp group chats and went door-to-door in the building.
While we did use Instagram and WhatsApp to promote our Bake Sale, a large part of our success from this event was due to the location and physical promotion. We chose to have the Bake Sale at Kingsmead Square due to the high levels of foot traffic our stall would be exposed to at that location. Moreover, leveraging sensory marketing in the set-up of our stall, we put up banners, decorations, and freebies provided by our client, and played music to help attract people (Krishna et al., 2016). While the music helped bring some people to our stall, it was the Marie Curie merchandise that gained the attention from a lot of people due to the charity’s high name recognition, prompting many people to donate even if they did not want to buy any food or drink. Furthermore, it prompted some people to approach us to enquire what the stall was about which then led to more purchases from people who wanted to help the cause.
Aside from this, we encouraged collaboration with local businesses in our Bake Sale by offering to promote their brands on our Instagram page via tagging them in our stories on the day. Not only does this help them, but them re-sharing our stories also lends our page a wider reach to their audiences.
Finally, Instagram and reaching people through our personal networks was heavily used to market the Open Mic Night. We increased the frequency of our posts in the final days, not only to generate buzz, but also bring our event front-of-mind as for many people attending such events is decided relatively last minute. In addition to this, choosing a pub that was in a central location was done to better attract our target market, while also allowing for many people to join last minute if they pass by due to it being more visible and easily accessible.
