Next Project
BHF, along with many other charities, have struggled post-pandemic and from the impact of the cost-of-living crisis. They lost direction when it came to social and struggled to keep up with internal demands for publicising a multitude of messages through social channels. They required an agency partner who could do a complete reset on the way social is used to help improve overall performance for the charity. This is where eight&four came in.
This project is a prime example of how eight&four integrate into a brand to understand their challenges and opportunities from within.
Charities were hit hard by the global pandemic and British Heart Foundation were no exception to this. Internal budgets were squeezed, headcount was cut and social was deprioritised across the board. The in-house team lost direction and struggled to manage the needs and expectations from the many teams within the organisation whilst also utilising social to push for donations and awareness of their extremely worthy cause.
The BHF approached us to develop a comprehensive 360° strategy keeping in mind their internal organisational complexities, multiple stakeholders’ demands and range of business objectives and key messages to push.
Through our extensive experience working within 3rd sector and charities such as Marie Curie, Gamble Aware and Alzheimer’s Society, we understand that delivering a full social strategy reset doesn’t just stop after the solutions document is presented. A large chunk of making a new strategy successful is ensuring the brand knows how to implement it and move forward. We need to develop new ways of working (e.g., developing reporting and community experience frameworks, outlining a cadence and approach to content planning meetings, to name a few) and deliver training workshops and onboarding plans to ensure everyone internally is singing from the same hymn sheet. These elements are crucial to how a social strategy reset can truly succeed.
An initial ‘Discovery’ phase including extensive research and stakeholder interviews allowed us to deep dive into how the BHF currently operates and how their teams integrate, the 3rd sector landscape and understanding target audience groups. Taking these learnings, we then developed a 360º strategy for the BHF to reach their target groups effectively (content / channel / community), underpinned with key frameworks for measuring performance that would evolve as they reached different stages of social maturity.
As part of the roll-out programme, we developed a comprehensive ‘Ways of Working’ document to bring the strategy to life, as well as further operational consultancy e.g., recommendations for new hires and resource utilisation. We rounded off this project by hosting training sessions with different areas of the business in collaboration with the BHF social team, to onboard the wider teams into the new way of thinking and inspire them to get the most out of social. We worked closely with our clients, and carried out multiple workshops and check-in sessions, to make sure the direction of travel felt right and doable for them – ultimately, our key priority.
