The challenge:

World Animal Protection came to us for help raising awareness of a little known issue: Ghost Gear – lost and abandoned fishing equipment that harms millions of sea animals each year. As well as growing their email list, they wanted to put pressure on supermarkets to agree to take action by working with their suppliers.

They came to us with a challenge – only one supermarket had so far signed up to the Global Ghost Gear Initiative. The problem? Other supermarkets refused to prioritise Ghost Gear because they didn’t think customers cared. So, World Animal Protection wanted to call on customers to make their voices heard.

What we did:

We worked with World Animal Protection to design a supporter communications journey that had two goals: 1) engaging existing supporters with the campaign and encouraging them to sign a petition aimed at all supermarkets, and 2) getting as many people as possible to write directly to a specific target supermarket.

We ran tests to find out which of three messaging approaches most resonated with people, and what chain of actions encouraged the best response – and ultimately drove more people to write to the target supermarket.

We also built a new petition page for World Animal Protection, integrating our experience of what works to both drive petition signatures and propel more supporters to take the secondary action of writing to the target supermarket. This meant that as well as delivering the campaign objective, we also provided insight and learnings to advance the organisation’s ongoing campaigning work.

The results:

As part of this campaign, World Animal Protection recruited around 25,000 new opted in supporters at a cost of £0.25 and engagement rates were high. The ads which we created to promote the action performed extremely well, driving a low cost per action.

The Ghost Gear campaign had an immediate impact: the main target supermarket contacted World Animal Protection within hours of us launching and met them within a week, agreeing to commit to the initiative and support the campaign’s goals.