Worlds Apart (Winter Appeal)
UK for UNHCR + Blue State
Since 2016, positive sentiment towards refugees in the UK has been in decline. So UNHCR — The UN’s Refugee Agency — challenged us to help reverse this trend and build public empathy toward refugees in order to increase critical support.
We knew that human connection and emotion would be the key to helping our audiences realise they can and should make a difference in the life of a refugee. So we asked ourselves the fundamental question: What does the average member of the UK public have in common with refugees who fled their homeland involuntarily and who often find themselves without food or shelter?
However, this journey to change minds reached a critical moment early on, last March. When the global pandemic hit, we knew it was only a matter of time before the virus appeared in camps, threatening millions of lives. How could we inspire empathy, understanding and action toward the crises of displaced people when we were all concerned with our own problems?
While we were not sure how people would react to this unprecedented (the most overused word of 2020) situation, we couldn’t delay responding. Within days of national lockdown, we created and launched crisis content and were developing new bespoke concepts.
Within ten weeks of the campaign launch, we raised more income online than we had in the whole of 2019. Working as one team with UNHCR, we also began to create responsive content, tapping into the nation’s growing feelings of frustration and distress from the pandemic by driving empathy for how refugees feel every single day.
We also listened closely to our audience. Our conversation monitor, which was AI-driven and designed and built-in Crimson Hexagon, allowed us to understand our audience’s sentiment. Identifying moments that could further bring the UK public to a closer understanding of the refugee experience — these real insights from across the nation helped create content across Facebook, Google Search, Instagram and digital display.
This monitoring led to a highly personalised campaign working across multiple audiences and channels. From engaging people interested in luxury travel missing holidays to people who were missing their international family and friends, we reminded each how refugees also were missing these things that we had previously taken for granted.
To our surprise, the initial reaction toward our emergency response and the research that went alongside it reinforced our belief that human context was key. Synergies became apparent regarding people in the UK coping with the pandemic in parallel with the voices of refugees.
When will I see my family?
I worry about my elderly parents.
I miss my friends.
These ‘truths’ closely reflected the question we’d challenged ourselves to answer at the start of this project and became the core concept behind our campaign — Worlds Apart. Where we let the contextual moments between pandemic hit Brits and displaced refugees sit literally — side by side. Bringing together the faces of the UK public alongside displaced communities to show that this was a situation both audiences were facing (and could hopefully overcome) together.
Once audiences had already donated, we then used social proofs to encourage further engagement. An interactive digital experience invited those already engaged; to guess if statements we had collected were from audiences in the UK or from refugees themselves; highlighting that the differences between ourselves and refugees and how we feel in certain situations were not as different as we might think. When it came to living in isolation and uncertainty, we all responded the same way.
But the best response of all was the final results — where we discovered that we’d raised more online for UNHCR in the UK in 2020 than in the previous three years combined.
A year-on-year donor increase of 360% and a return of ad spend of 3:1.
Amid the pandemic, our campaign showed the UK stood in solidarity with refugees and their need for protection from COVID-19. And our journey to generate empathy towards Refugees in the UK had successfully begun.