VSO News Report from Jon Snow

Brief

VSO is an international development charity helping give children a future through education and improving the standards of care in hospitals, with free www.skills training and social development.

As is the case with most charities VSO relies highly on the donations and goodwill it receives from the general public approached both on the street and at the door.

To show their gratitude for each individual gift received and drive donor retention, VSO wanted to be able to engage with new donors personally and immediately to both say thank you and explain a little more about where their money would be going.

Strategy

The obvious choice for immediate contact with new donors canvassed in this way was email. This is a medium the digital marketers at VSO had existing familiarity with and, being a low cost mass-marketing tool, wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive for the organisation to use.

While a great option for the reasons stated, VSO wanted to go a step further than simple html emails and give something more. Given the power of good video marketing it was decided that introducing video content in an engaging way would make the donor feel valued and better explain ‘face to face’ how their money would be used.

Going further still, the ideal was to have the videos personalised with a message that could speak specifically to each individual donor, which they could easily share should they wish to do so.

Execution

Bulk creation of truly personalised video content on a daily or weekly basis can be a difficult task, and conjures up images of vast teams of video editors working tirelessly to deliver hundreds of unique videos to a horrendous deadline. Thankfully however, a very good level of personalisation can be achieved by compiling unique videos from smaller tailored segments or by overlaying various forms of other media such as text and images onto generic clips using an automated workflow.

Veteran newscaster Jon Snow is an ex-VSO volunteer and as such both understands the valuable work they do and has great affection for the charity. With this and the complications of mass video personalisation in mind, it was decided that a live news report style video would be both a good fit for the thank you message and provide good options for personalisation.
Jon Snow recorded a generic piece to camera thanking the donor directly and this was supplied to us for editing down to an appropriate segment for the campaign. We then built a system which effectively works as an advanced video mail-merge tool which personalises the video with donor information and delivers it to them via email.

Our system allows VSO to securely upload csv/excel lists of donor contact data on a daily or weekly basis much as you might do with any bulk email marketing tool. Once received, the system automatically processes each record, geocoding the data to extract the donor’s locality, and then compiles this along with appropriate graphics into a unique VSO branded video, thanking each donor by name in a “live” broadcast from their hometown.

As each personalised video is generated, the tool uploads it as an unlisted video to VSO’s YouTube channel and uses then uses the API of VSO’s bulk email provider to send a personalised html email to the donor, featuring the video and further information on the volunteer they are sponsoring.

If this wasn’t enough, the entire system operates on demand making effective use of Amazon (AWS) cloud servers, meaning that ongoing running costs are next to nothing (just $0.13/hour in fact while the videos are created).

Results

This campaign has been highly successful for VSO, and has been well regarded by all stakeholders both inside and outside the company.

Bringing video and personalisation into their marketing campaign in this way has increased engagement over 50 per cent between VSO and their valuable donors and has doubled the results of previous automated thank you emails.

Furthermore, use of YouTube as the video delivery medium has also increased engagement with VSO’s other channel content, resulting in a great way for VSO to expand their reach beyond their core donor base, in a friendly and genuine way.

Finally, by making appropriate use of cloud and social media services such as AWS and YouTube, the ongoing operational costs of the system are negligible, resulting in a seriously high ROI for this campaign.