Marketing is unfamiliar territory for me and so when tasked with devising a marketing strategy, I turned to a field where I feel much more at home: behavioural research. In my reading, the key insight that kept cropping up over and over again was the idea of connection.
Marketing thinks in terms of buying and selling products, and I had initially assumed that underlying donations to charity, was the idea that people were buying a sense of moral elevation from feeling like they’d done something good. However, the reality is a lot less cynical. People are more likely to donate when they see the impact of the charity they are donating to: what they are buying is a better world for others, and they’re willing to do so at a financial cost to themselves.
However, in a charity whose work is as sensitive as CAP’s showing direct results from children and families is not an option, and so my job became figuring out how to indirectly communicate the human impact of CAP’s work, without violating the confidentiality of the children and families who rely on CAP’s work. In order to do this.
I had to understand myself how to put myself into the shoes of these families and the struggles they faced. While I became well-versed in the facts and figures that prove the impact of charitable organisations from the extensive reading I conducted, it wasn’t until I visited one of CAP’s welfare hubs that the human impact of my work finally clicked.
While I cannot share details of the session due to confidentiality, the detail that I believe best encapsulates CAP’s ethos was a moment when I first arrived at the session. I was asked to remove my volunteer’s lanyard as in that room, there was no hierarchy. This manifested the theme of “walking alongside” families I’d seen so clearly echoed in posts on CAP’s social media or in briefing documents. In order to create the therapeutic relationship and connection necessary, we must all remember that we are human. It is this humanity that makes the difference, not the benevolent implementation of change by a higher being.
This egalitarian approach echoes through every stage of CAP's work, and it is this sense of connection and equality people seek when they donate to buy a better world for their fellow man. This approach of mutual humanity and connection was the final puzzle piece to creating a social media strategy that reflects CAP and their mission. If our pages can be an inviting, friendly space filled with compassionate discussion and humanity, then donors and interested parties alike can feel the impact of their donations to CAP, even if only through a screen.