Executive summary

The WaterAid challenge helps to raise funds for 785 million people worldwide who have no access to clean water. Participants make a donation to join and pledge to drink only water for an entire month. 

For this campaign, WaterAid wanted to reach two very different audiences at the same time: “Healthies”, or fitness fans who donate to join the challenge but don’t raise funds beyond that, and “Greenies” - WaterAid supporters and their families, who frequently join the challenge. Healthies needed to understand that the challenge is more than a reminder to stay hydrated; it’s a crucial means of fundraising for 785 million people without access to clean water. Meanwhile, Greenies’ support needed to be activated, and get them to encourage their friends and family to join in.

We knew that personalised video, with its potential to speak relevantly to specific people, at scale, was the key to making both these goals a reality. Using our personalisation engine, voundry, we delivered 2,000 unique videos, tailored to resonate deeply with each individual recipient. 

We infused our videos with data provided by WaterAid on their participants - who they were and why they were joining the challenge - to help raise the profile of the WaterAid cause. Our campaign achieved a higher open and click-through rate than any email WaterAid had sent to participants up to that point, and 15% more participants engaged with the messaging.

Aims

We were tasked to create an email campaign in conjunction with the WaterAid challenge - donate to sign up and drink only water for a whole month. The objective was to increase awareness of the serious issues behind this fun challenge, and the importance of using it to raise funds for those in need. To do this, WaterAid needed to make its emails more interesting and persuasive to encourage people to not only open them, but click through, and engage with the message. Due to the bushfires in Australia at the time, and how affected people all over the country were feeling, there was an additional challenge - more than ever, the message needed to reach out in a personal way.

WaterAid wanted participants to understand that this was more than just a way to get healthier, or a fun thing to do with friends - it’s an important way to highlight the predicament of millions of people who have no access to clean water. By raising awareness on the cause, WaterAid wanted video recipients to be more invested in encouraging their friends and family to donate.

Approach

We mobilised our personalisation engine, voundry, as the perfect solution for creating an email campaign that could reach WaterAid’s large and varied audiences in a personal, and compelling, way. voundry renders videos and GIFs in almost real time, and can produce anywhere from 1 to over 100,000 unique videos in minutes. For this campaign, we used voundry to create 2,000 unique videos combining WaterAid’s existing visual assets with participant data provided by WaterAid, including their name and reasons for joining the challenge.

distillery handled every aspect of the campaign from concept to the tech behind it, which helped to drive down cost as no external tech partner was needed. The tech itself was also instrumental, as by its nature personalisation tech is a cost-effective way to produce content at scale and reach thousands of people. Finally, by repurposing WaterAid’s existing visual assets, we again drove down costs so that the NGO could instead maximise its funds for communities in need.

Achievements

The campaign is ongoing at the time of writing, and we are happy to report great results in the initial months. Emails sent to the Greenies audience achieved an open rate of 32% - the highest of any email for the 2020 WaterAid Challenge so far. Meanwhile, click-through on those emails sits at 33% - again, the highest click-through rate of any email so far. Initial results also show that 15% more participants engaged with our email campaign, indicating potentially higher conversion rates to follow.