The Guardian is an iconic British newspaper, but like all news organisations, it had suffered from a disastrous couple of decades. In 2016, they embarked on a strategy to get more of their online readers to support them financially, without introducing a paywall which would deny their journalism to many in need. By early 2019, they broke even for the first time in recent history, with over 1m people supporting them financially. So, they decided to double down on their strategy, as only about 5%
of regular online users give the Guardian regular financial support. Our brief was to try to double their supporter base to 2m by 2022 across the UK, USA and Australia.
To achieve that, we believed that the Guardian needed to restate their values, which stem from the fact they are owned by no one. Their values particularly powerful in times of uncertainty. But we knew we had to do something different to New York Time’s powerful ‘Truth’ work. We also knew that a significant number of readers were increasingly avoiding the news, believing they could do nothing about it. So, we turned to the essay Kath Viner wrote when she took up her post as Editor. In it we spotted this statement: ‘The mission of the Guardian since 1821: to use clarity and imagination to build hope’. We thought that was an incredible statement in today’s context. But we knew we would have to give hope urgency and teeth. So, ‘Hope is Power’ was born.
The week the campaign launched was the Guardian’s biggest week of their year to date in financial contributions. Almost 400 subscriptions and contributions came directly from the landing page, worth over £23k. Throughout the campaign, the landing page was the single article that appeared the most in the process of people converting to contributions, suggesting our work was driving contributions. There were over 200k visits to the landing page, with an average dwell time of 2.4minutes. There were 53 million impression and over 53k clicks, an increase of 265% vs the Tabloid Campaign on a far smaller spend. Social impressions reached 11 Million; 9.4M paid and 1.6M organic. The response was overwhelmingly positive. 43 people have contacted us diectly requesting prints of our poster artwork. The butterfly has also inspired an exhibition for Peckham Festival 2020.