How Starlight Children’s Foundation created its best-performing campaign
Challenge
Starlight Children’s Foundation needed a fundraising campaign to attract donations in a competitive sector.
Solution
YouGov designed a custom survey solution to optimize campaign elements.
Impact
YouGov’s insights guided a highly successful fundraising campaign that surpassed targets.
Business challenge
Starlight Children’s Foundation aimed to develop an effective fundraising campaign in a highly competitive sector. To maximize donations, the campaign required a strategic approach that combined the right imagery, creative development and copy propositions.
The challenge was to identify the most impactful combination of attributes that would resonate with donors and drive donations. Given the time-sensitive nature of the campaign and the charity’s limited resources, the research needed to be both efficient and cost-effective.
Solution
YouGov conducted a custom survey in two waves to gather comprehensive and reliable insights for Starlight Children’s Foundation's fundraising campaign. The first wave focused on testing various child-specific variables and attributes to determine which elements would resonate most with potential donors. The second wave evaluated different taglines and creative treatment options, allowing the charity to refine its messaging and visual presentation.
This two-wave approach ensured that all campaign elements were thoroughly tested without overwhelming respondents. To maintain consistency and respondent fatigue, YouGov implemented rigorous quality control measures, such as randomized sample splitting. With over 100 images used across both surveys, the randomized approach helped participants concentrate on specific sets of variables and options.
Business outcomes
Based on the survey insights, YouGov recommended the optimal combination of image selection, creative treatment, and copy for Starlight Children's Foundation's fundraising campaign. This "perfect recipe" led to a highly successful campaign, surpassing targets and becoming one of Starlight's most effective appeals.
The campaign's strong performance, particularly in paid social and digital channels, directly correlated with the creative elements recommended by YouGov, validating the research findings.
“We tested YouGov’s research findings within our paid social and digital campaign activity & they affirmed the research findings. Overall, the campaign exceeded targets and has been one of our best-performing appeals to date. Thanks for giving us such useful insights to help shape this campaign and future comms.”