The Thinking:
WaterAid is an international non-governmental organisation focused on water, sanitation and hygiene. Its annual Just Water challenge asks participants to drink only water for a whole month, and helps to raise funds for 785 million people worldwide with no access to clean water. WaterAid Australia asked distillery to bring this challenge to life by communicating with participants and supporters in order to maximise engagement and donations.
The Making
WaterAid wanted to address two key audiences in Australia: ‘Healthies’ (fitness fans who donate to join the challenge, but don’t raise funds beyond that) and ‘Greenies’ (WaterAid supporters who frequently join the challenge). We needed Healthies to realise that Just Water is about more than staying hydrated - it’s a crucial means of fundraising. We needed Greenies to encourage their friends and family to also join in.
We repurposed WaterAid’s existing video assets into personalised video content – emailed to both groups – that addressed challenge participants from each audience by name, appealed to their specific reasons for taking part and reminded them of the need for donations.
The Blowing Up
We used our personalisation engine, voundry, which renders videos and animations in almost real time, to reach WaterAid’s large and varied audiences in a personal and compelling way. voundry enabled us to deliver 2,000 videos uniquely tailored to each recipient.
Our targeted messages spanned the full range of motivations, and used encouraging language to strike the right tone of voice, even when sharing hard-hitting facts. We were careful to exercise particular sensitivity in light of the wildfires that were devastating large areas of Australia at the time.
The Positive Impact
The campaign was WaterAid’s first foray into personalised marketing, and as content lovers, distillery is proud to have made that first experience a successful one.
We saw fantastic results for the emails we sent to Greenies – a solid open rate of almost 35% (a 5% uplift from 2019) and nearly double the click-through rate of the average email sent out by WaterAid during the challenge (an uplift of 16%).
Meanwhile, the emails we sent to Healthies saw strong engagement with our video, with a click-through rate of over 22% – almost 7% higher than the average click-through rate for the campaign as a whole. Because we knew participants were taking part for health reasons, we were able to tailor the video to tap into their motivations and keep them interested.
If you’d like to find out how we can make a positive impact for your brand, get in touch.