Comic Relief is tracking engagement and recall of its marketing activity in the run up to Red Nose Day to track which channels are working best and tweak activity accordingly.
The research, being carried out by SPA Future Thinking, covers all media, including word-of-mouth, and canvasses both the general public and fundraisers.
It will measure the extent to which this year’s Red Nose Day campaign on March 18 engages its audience in three ways: online diaries followed by focus groups, a website survey, and an online survey.
Comic Relief head of marketing Alison Cowan said: “This project is a great way to benchmark what really works across all media, from BBC trails to press and outdoor advertising and the word on the street. The qualitative element enables us to tweak our campaign in realtime. The overall findings, including quantitative work, will inform the campaign we’re putting together for Sport Relief 2012, and of course Red Nose Day 2013.”
The qualitative element of the project kicks off first. Online diaries form the centrepiece of the qualitative strand. A group of 36 people in Birmingham, Manchester and London will keep online diaries of any interaction they have with Comic Relief in the run up to Red Nose Day, noting all mentions they come across. Participants will also be asked to write a weekly blog on what they’ve seen and how it has impacted their behaviour. Each diary will be monitored weekly.
Focus groups with the diarists will take place in the first week immediately following Red Nose Day. Researchers will drill down into how the marketing activity changed the fundraising events held by participants.
The quantitative strand comprises an online survey that aims to gather 1,000 responses to the Red Nose Day website, www.rednoseday.com, and establish how easy respondents found it to navigate. An email survey will go out to fundraisers to gauge how campaign marketing materials performed and how sponsors reacted to them.
Charlotte Butterworth, group managing director at SPA Future Thinking, said: “This is intensive but totally appropriate for a charity such as Comic Relief – people are so engaged with it they are willing to give up the time.”
