The 30 second read:
We developed a high performing engagement quiz for the British Red Cross, introduced new collaborative and agile ways of working, and used testing and optimisation to reach hundreds of thousands of people at a low cost.
The longer read:
The challenge
The British Red Cross has huge global reach, working in 192 countries around the world. But not enough people know this! Our task was to use their strong USP as the basis for an evergreen engagement tool that would reach potential new supporters, while communicating the scale and importance of the British Red Cross’ work.
The tool had to be compelling and easy to use in order to motivate as many people as possible to engage with the British Red Cross and its work. With a large cold audience, finding the right messaging to start a conversation was key, leading with content that was audience-centric rather than organisation-centric.
Our success relied on establishing collaborative and agile ways of working with the British Red Cross team, and introducing a culture of testing and optimisation to refine the end product.
What we did and why
- Trialling initial ideas
After a creative co-design session with the British Red Cross team, we selected three quiz ideas to test before putting more budget behind the winning one. Inspired by the success of online tests of your geography knowledge, as well as Wordle going big, we went with quizzes on populations, locations and country outlines.
Using a minimum viable product (MVP) approach, we then wrote and built simple versions of each quiz, and promoted them on Facebook with a small ads budget to see which would generate the most traffic and engagement.
2. Building the final tool
A timed quiz performed best in the MVPs – a new format for us. It challenged people to name as many countries as they could in one minute, playing on users’ competitive instincts. The Forward Action in-house development team built the quiz out into a flowing, easy-to-use journey that people could try time and time again. (Want to test your geography knowledge? Give it a go here!)
Before people were shown their score, they were invited to sign up for emails. And afterwards, they were shown a daisy chain of further asks offering a range of simple ways to get involved (share, donate and visit the Red Cross shop).
3. Learning and improving
Testing, analysing results and optimising the creative, across both the Facebook ads and the quiz itself, was key to the success of the final tool. This enabled us to reduce our cost per click and increase the number of people taking the quiz.
We also tested the copy for the ‘pivot’ slide to maximise email sign-ups. This invites people to add their name to support the British Red Cross’ work in 192 countries by receiving emails.
The impact
The quiz had an 86% completion rate, which meant almost 150,000 people saw the British Red Cross’ new brand proposition – a huge win for their brand awareness.
This was a new kind of project for the British Red Cross, with great potential to be developed further. We were able to leave them with some really important key learnings, agile ways of working, and a plan for future tests to run to continue to optimise the quiz’s performance.
