A moment I’ll never forget in my career.
I was sat in a tiny, windowless meeting room. Just myself and a Director. It was the early 2010s, and I was Innovation manager for a major UK charity.
The Director looked me in the eye and said: “Joe, these innovation projects you’re running, you’re trying to turn us into Disney, and we’re a charity. We’re not Disney.”
It had a finality to it; the culmination of a 1,000 tiny signals the organisation had been sending me, but not spelling out. I’d put my heart and soul into those innovative tests, so it felt like a personal defeat. My ego took a bruising.
The role was at Save the Children UK and it had been my dream job to work there. It was a cause I cared deeply about, and I was working on an exciting range of projects, spanning fundraising and communications, insight and strategy.
I was working with adam&eve, the hottest creative agency at the time, who had just launched their ground-breaking John Lewis Christmas ads. And they were using my audience insight to steer what would become the very successful No Child Born to Die campaign.
My argument at the time was: Save the Children is missing an important audience for growth. The charity was focused on its traditional, older donors; they saw the charity as a trusted institution. They donated and said ‘you’re the experts, use my money as you see fit’.
But the future lay with parents with young children; a powerful connection to the cause, but less trusting of big institutions. To engage them we would need to change.
The key audience insight I identified did not concern charity or even passing on values; it was enabling parents to enjoy fun, memorable moments with their children. One research respondent likened it to the simplicity of kicking the leaves in autumn with their kids.
Using this insight, I tested a lot of ideas. Crazy ideas; games, stories, quizzes, SMS, apps, non-digital experiences…all around the concept of solving their problems and creating valuable family moments.
We produced a lot of data but the charity did not want to scale the concepts.
Because “we’re not Disney”.
These concepts took us too far from how a charity acts and how it expected itself to act. It was not our role to entertain, or even to solve problems for this audience.
So I left Save the Children UK having worked there for seven years. It felt like a job half-done. Nursing my ego, I left to join Plan International UK in 2013.
I tried not to pay attention in the coming years to what my former employer was doing. I still loved the organisation but I preferred to look forward.
But try as I might, I had to keep looking. And over time Save the Children UK started promoting a number of new fundraising and brand-promoting initiatives; a Peppa Pig Walk, build a den day, a subscription service with messages from around the world.
The odd project became a series of products, campaigns and tests. For someone in the sector, these became unmissable; they were heavily promoted and prominent on the charity’s webpage. All were targeted at parents with young children.
Some failed and disappeared. Others were outrageous successes. A partnership promoting a Mog the Cat book became the biggest selling book of Christmas 2015, raising over £1 million.
Save the Children UK has continued in this vein and it’s clear that they have made a successful strategic jump engaging the parent audience. Today they have a product called Wonderbooks, beautifully illustrated story books telling children’s stories from around the world.
Eight in ten Wonderbooks subscribers are new to the charity. Of the minority who are not new supporters, over half are lapsed returners. The charity has told me that the product is delivering the strategic task it was designed for.
When I left, I really underestimated the charity. I had too much ego, and too little experience to realise what a dynamic organisation it actually was!
It wasn’t moving fast enough for me, but it was moving fast enough for itself. Importantly it had the culture to take measured risks – based on insight. The leadership created energy and drive that you could feel across the organisation. It took me leaving to realise how rare this is.
There’s one thing they don’t tell you about strategy: When you present a strategy, people will look at you as if you’re mad.
With strategy, you’re trying to bend the future very slightly towards the needs of your organisation. But you can never predict the future, and you can’t prove anything until you apply it.
This is what makes strategy terrifying. For everyone.
But there’s one thing harder than developing a strategy, and that’s selling it.
There will always be voices – as there should be – to stick to convention, either within your organisation or your sector. Expect misunderstandings, disbelief and distrust – even ridicule. When it comes to leading on strategy, this is the job!
You have but one saving grace - insight – into your audiences and related trends. It’s the best evidence you’ll ever get.
But you must remember that the easy insights won’t separate you from other organisations. The ones that count are the insights you can apply imaginatively.
It’s kicking the leaves.
Martin Weigel of Wieden+Kennedy said: “Strategy is fundamentally about informed imagination.” This is the way to approach things. Imagination will naturally scare many of your colleagues, but to avoid it will doom you to using ever smaller levers to stimulate growth.
Success requires insight, persuasion and sheer dogged persistence.
You can spend a lot on audience insight, or very little. But insight will only lead to strategic impact if it’s used imaginatively and is championed bravely.
Three rules for strategic success through insight
1. Understand your audience holistically, not just their immediate relationship to your organisation, cause or sector. This is how you identify creative opportunities, like ‘kicking the leaves’.
2. Solve problems for your audience. Do it uniquely, creatively, unconstrained by what a typical organisation in your sector does.
3. Build a culture of bravery - internally and externally – as Save the Children UK has done. They put aside the ‘we’re not Disney’ blocker. Be different, rooted in insight.
