People-driven Success: Lessons From a Landmark Campaign

My name is Zach, and I’m a human man who works in advertising. Weird intro, right? If you keep reading, you’ll understand.

Last year, Principles launched a brand platform and campaign for one of our favorite clients, a respectable hometown charity called Community Living Toronto. Their mission is to support people living with an intellectual disability.

The project ended up celebrating the organization’s 75th anniversary with the launch of a new brand platform accompanied by a year-long, multifaceted digital campaign filled with incredible storytelling, meaningful engagement mechanisms and successful fundraising asks. We got here by conducting a thorough discovery process to find audience insights, followed by the exploration of several big creative ideas. Once a concept was chosen, we developed our brand platform and executed the creative assets with careful precision, paying extra attention to the human stories we wanted to amplify.

The campaign, “75 Years of Belonging,” showed incredible results. It surpassed all established business objectives and generated positive community feedback, while winning us several awards. For the above reasons, I thought writing this article would be an easy task — but it was not.
Why was I sitting at my desk faced with writer’s block? I knew the campaign was special, but I felt like I was writing about our data-driven approach and quantifiably record-breaking results until I was blue in the face and still, something was missing. Then it hit me. This was about the people — it always has been.

As a strategist, it’s easy to become hyper-focused on the analytics and the quantitative, tangible stuff, but creative campaigns don’t win because of algorithms and blocking charts alone. Most times, they win because we tap into the human experience and authentically portray a person’s story that needs telling.

Our audiences are compelled because we’re reaching them emotionally. We’re meeting them at their most human and often vulnerable place. In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), it feels especially important to call this out. While technology, and AI specifically, will continue to blow our minds as it evolves, one thing it will never be is people.

For the remainder of this article, I’d like to explore three groups of people: our target audience, our clients and our community members. When I reflect on what made our Community Living Toronto project special, the answer revolves around the care we took to truly listen to and learn from the humans in each of these groups.

Our Target Audience

Audience-centric campaign strategies are nearly always the way to go, so it is not unexpected to see this group at the top of our list. As professional communicators, we conduct deep research and identify compelling insights that we leverage to compel action from our target audience. While I hope we continue to evolve and improve this practice, target-audience-centricity is something we do fairly well as a sector. As such, I’d like to spend more time exploring our other two groups of people who are frequently overlooked in audience strategies: our clients and our community members.

Our Clients

Clients belong in our audience strategies. Principles works exclusively with clients in the charitable sector, which means we’re meeting humans with immeasurable passion and drive every single day. If you’re familiar with the nonprofit sector, then you know these folks have fewer resources but much more work.

I knew this before our very first call with the amazing people at Community Living Toronto. This brings me to the message I repeat most often as a formerly-burned-out ad strategist: “The right strategy is not the one with the most channels or the best insights or the strongest looking presentation deck. The right strategy is the one we actually have the capacity to execute ambitiously without burning ourselves out.”

Getting to know the human side of our clients is vital. We need to spend as much time understanding their individual abilities, mental health and capacity to collaborate as we do understanding their vision for our campaign. In the case of our work with Community Living Toronto, this meant learning to lean on our clients’ closely established relationships with community members and asking them to co-lead parts of the discovery process. As we got to know each other better, it also became clear that the funding for this project was a rare occurrence. We began to understand what other business problems they were facing that we could also help solve along the way, to free up capacity for them to work on other projects.

The result? Our clients got their original ask — a 75th anniversary brand. But because we got to know them, we were also able to help them launch the following:

• A 12-month storytelling campaign on a custom-built microsite with integrated email automations.
• A social strategy that garnered channel engagement rate increases between 372% and 1,445% year over year.
• An audience growth and lead generation strategy that increased their email subscriber list by 4.5%.
• Important digital and social media advertising infrastructure to support evergreen marketing efforts moving forward.
• Digital marketing strategy is important, but let’s never forget that there’s a human behind every keyboard.

Our Community Members

We talk about “audience-centric” marketing a lot, but “community-centric” needs more airtime.

For those who work with nonprofits and charities, I highly recommend exploring the invaluable thought leadership coming from the Community Centric Fundraising movement. Regardless of your campaign’s focus, I urge you to think more about how we can better center equity-deserving community voices in both our strategies and our creative deliverables.

In the case of my team’s work with Community Living Toronto, this meant meeting with the actual experts: people living with an intellectual disability and their families. Throughout our discovery process, we slowed down, listened and learned so much.

A few years prior, I likely would have approached this differently, collecting only a list of social workers and allies and calling them subject matter experts, but this would have produced a radically different strategy. Instead, with the guidance of our amazing clients, we came to recognize with certainty how one’s lived experience best positions our community to teach us what we need to know. However, we must first integrate space for better listening within our discovery processes.

In the case of “75 Years of Belonging,” our clients facilitated dialogue with specific community members, which led us to something much bigger than a mere pillar of the discovery process. Their unique stories sparked the recommendation for (and then became the centerpieces of) a 12-month storytelling campaign. Because when we listened to the community, we learned that this is what was needed.

A Reminder of Our “Why”

As professional communicators, it’s important that we conduct rigorous research to create communications strategies that are data-driven and based on solid insights. Every day, technology and AI continue to evolve to new frontiers with tools we never imagined we’d have, helping us drive even more complex and sophisticated strategies. As this evolution continues, let’s not forget the reason why we’re here: people.