'Easy Peasy’ campaign hits new high for Volunteering England

This was one of the messages put out by national volunteering development agency, Volunteering England, as part of a campaign to promote its network of volunteer centres. The campaign, which ran from September 06 to February 07, set out to raise awareness of the new common brand identity adopted by volunteer centres last year, by showing people that volunteering via their local centre was ‘easy peasy’.

Jane Heath, assistant director of outreach services at Volunteering England, said, ‘Volunteer Centres have always provided an easy route into volunteering but as a network they have suffered from low public awareness, caused in part by a lack of a common identity. Their new branding provided an ideal opportunity to run a campaign to raise this profile and show people just how easy it can be to get involved.’

And it worked. According to an ICM survey, Volunteer Centre brand recall in the key target areas had reached 41% by the end of the campaign, a huge rise of 37%. The campaign featured a mix PR and above the line advertising across target media including radio and transport networks as well as a full page feature in the Daily Mirror. The campaign also had a significant online element, including a viral game which made top ten listing in the Lycos viral chart and a feature as Yahoo’s charity of the month in January. 35,000 unique visitors visited the campaign website and a further two thousand calls were made to the helpline looking for contact details of their nearest centre,.

The campaign was developed and managed for Volunteering England by new social enterprise, the Red Foundation. Red’s director, Jamie Thomas, said, ‘This was a great campaign to work on and enabled us to launch our marketing service in a fun and creative way and at the same time gain satisfaction from such a positive result.’ The campaign’s creative and PR was generated and placed via volunteering charity TimeBank and online marketing agency Digital Outlook.

Jane Heath echoes this, ‘The campaign exceeded our most optimistic expectations and highlighted that there are many people out there that want to volunteer and will hopefully look to volunteer centres as their first port of call.’


back