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By manifesto on
Parkinson’s UK drives better care, treatments and quality of life for people living with the condition. They work with the international research community to develop life-changing treatments, faster. And they won’t stop until they find a cure.
The charity wanted to launch a new campaign for Parkinson’s Awareness Week 2017 to raise urgently needed funds for Parkinson’s research under the campaign name We Won’t Wait. This would be their first integrated fundraising campaign for Parkinson’s Awareness Week, with a target of recruiting tens of thousands of new financial supporters to help the charity deliver its ambitious new research strategy. They engaged London agency Manifesto to devise and deliver a digital campaign that was different, that was creative, and that would capture the details of potential long-term supporters.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Parkinson’s UK already used Drupal for their main website, and loved its flexibility and stability. The real question was over which version of Drupal to use. While the main Parkinson’s UK website is built on Drupal 7, the team working on We Won’t Wait wanted to ensure that the microsite’s code would be reusable for future campaigns, so D7’s impending obsolescence was a factor which weighed against it. Drupal 7 would also require the use of quite a few contributed modules to achieve the base requirements for the project. Drupal 8, on the other hand, shipped with everything the team needed to complete the project goals.
The selection of Drupal 8 and the Acquia Cloud platform for the We Won’t Wait microsite meant that Parkinson’s UK were able to get this experimental campaign to market quickly and with confidence that, no matter how large the response, the solution would be secure and reliable.
Drupal’s open, modular framework allowed the developers to work in parallel without conflicts and provided ready-made solutions to two of the site’s main requirements:
- Ability to easily create and manage landing pages: Drupal offers several different options to help site builders create landing pages, of which Page Manager is still the easiest and most powerful solution. It provided Parkinson’s UK with a friendly drag-and-drop interface to add and arrange new blocks.
- Ability to reuse UI widgets: Drupal 8 ships Block Content in core, which allows the creation of "Block Types" where you define the fields and how they display. Site builders then have the ability to create and edit instances of these Block Types.
Other reasons for choosing Drupal 8 were:
- The concept of 'Entity' in core was a huge help when it came to integrating Impossible Software personalised video creation with the UI/UX. The team created a custom "Impossible" entity and mapped their bundles to the different Impossible videos. As a consequence, creating an Impossible entity instance will generate a video. All done with few lines of code!
- Drupal Ajax framework: UI widgets and Calls to Action were meant to work without the page being reloaded, forcing a reliance on Ajax requests and Modal Forms. Using a CMS/Framework other than Drupal would have meant writing all these handlers ourselves. Instead, with Drupal, it’s a simple, easy task.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Manifesto worked closely with the team at Parkinson’s UK to set campaign objectives that would deliver real long-term value for the organisation, and to devise a strategy for achieving them. Together, they identified three potential target audiences: people living with Parkinson’s and existing supporters (very warm audience); people who know someone with Parkinson’s (lukewarm audience); and people who are unaware of, or have only a basic understanding of Parkinson’s (cold audience).
Supporter-get-supporter strategy
To support the aims of raising awareness and building support for research into new and better treatments for people living with Parkinson’s, Manifesto devised a strategy for empowering the very warm audience to act as brand champions: target these supporters with engaging communications and give them the tools they needed to amplify the campaign messages across social media.
Personalised video
People with Parkinson’s and their families were invited to create a personalised video message on a campaign microsite, and then share the video with their social media connections. Personalised video technology made it possible to interweave people’s personal stories with core campaign messages using just a couple of images and short text snippets from the user.
User journeys tailored to each audience
Meanwhile, the lukewarm and cold audiences were presented with different user journeys in which they watched a personalised version of the campaign hero video before being asked to register their support and make a donation.
Supporting content
Alongside the personalised content Manifesto helped create additional videos telling the stories of real people living with Parkinson’s, illuminating some of the less-well-known aspects of the condition and explaining how new and better treatments could improve their lives.
The development process saw three developers from multiple regions working simultaneously for three weeks, using a Kanban methodology and Gitflow development workflow. The Acquia Cloud API allowed the development team to build a Continuous Integration system to handle testing and deployment onto Acquia’s environments. This replicable, scalable and reliable deployment process freed the developers to concentrate on making the user experience as enjoyable as possible.
Results
The campaign launched on the first day of Parkinson’s Awareness Week, April 10th 2017, with email communications tailored to the very warm audience. We Won’t Wait empowered over 600 people living with Parkinson’s to share their stories via personalised video messages.
Raising awareness
Over the 21-day campaign, more than 68,000 people watched 100% of the hero video, while more than 340k people watched at least 10 seconds. The campaign prompted conversations about symptoms and treatments for Parkinson’s on social media which involved hundreds of people and helped inform a much wider audience about less-well-known aspects of the condition.
Amplifying voices
By giving the charity’s most motivated supporters the tools they needed to create their own personalised video messages, the campaign facilitated thousands more social shares and brought the campaign message to a secondary audience. Over 82% of traffic to the campaign microsite originated from social media shares. The average time spent on the microsite was almost 3 minutes (02:54), more than double the Parkinson’s UK site average (01:18) over the same period.
Recruiting support
The campaign microsite collected donations from thousands of new supporters and captured the details of thousands more, all of whom can now be nurtured by the charity with further opportunities to help fund a new wave of Parkinson’s research. In total, over 500,000 people took some sort of action during the campaign – driving real engagement during Parkinson’s Awareness Week and beyond.
340k engaged views
500k actions
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Page Manager and Block Content (included in core) were critical to the success of the project. With all user journeys starting from landing pages, the team needed to be able to easily create new landing pages and add reusable widgets.
Drupal 8 allows for the creation and management of landing pages through addition of the Page Manager module, and the creation of custom, reusable widgets through Block Content.
Community contributions:
Page Manager
- Page title block placed on block page renders empty
- Allow disabling Drupal blocks/regions when Page is viewed
Maxlength
Drupal Core
Organizations involved:
Project team:
Sectors:
Non-profit
