Campaign concepts: three Big Duck examples to inspire your own

Whether you’re trying to raise awareness, recruit audiences, or bring in donations, campaigns are one way to inspire audiences to take action with your organization. There are tons of ideas out there for making your campaign a success, but Big Duck has one tried and true strategy that you’ll see in most every campaign we work on: a concept.

A campaign concept ties together all elements of a campaign—it’s a hook or idea that convinces your audience that now is the time to take action. Concepts give your audiences something to care about and a message to get behind. Without them, audiences might not understand what action you’re asking them to take or why.

Chances are you see campaign concepts in action all the time. Here three examples illustrating how we’ve used concepts to inspire action in our work:

1. Math for America: This program providing fellowships for public school science and math teachers used a concept, Practice What You Teach, for their recruitment campaign. The concept is woven into the slogans and design to inspire action from their target audience: smart, passionate educators. This concept went multi-channel: from subway posters to education magazines, there’s a consistent look, feel, and message across all their campaign communications.
2. City Harvest: A nonprofit spearheading food donation and distribution programs across New York, City Harvest had seen substantial success with their annual fundraising campaign, Skip Lunch Fight Hunger. They came to us with even greater fundraising goals and we shook up their landmark concept with a fresh new concept—The Power Lunch—capturing their energy, urgency, and inspiring New Yorkers across platforms to transform their lunch money into an investment against hunger.
3. New York School of Interior Design: A solid brand identity should always carry over into campaign initiatives. Big Duck updated NYSID’s brand and extended it into the concept Turn your Creativity into a Career to help NYSID to stand out to prospective students and increase applications for enrollment. Positioning the school as the place for emerging designers to find or change careers, their new brand transformed (and reinforced) the look and feel of their annual recruitment campaign concept, motivating students to apply.

Next time your organization is planning its next big fundraising, recruitment, or advocacy campaign, remember to stop and think about a concept. Spend some time brainstorming what might grab the attention of your audiences and how that might play out across your communications channels.