HopeKitchen, initially conceived in South Africa, is a social enterprise whose sole purpose was to tackle hunger amongst schoolchildren across the UK and various African and South Asian countries. During my initial appointment on the project as a marketer, I was consulted on my thoughts surrounding how HopeKitchen could go about creating a buzz and increasing their online traffic in order to attract donations.
From previous projects, I had prior knowledge of what methods would suit HopeKitchen best and proposed digital posters and graphics for online circulation. Simply put, the aim here was to circulate digital marketing literature which evoked strong emotional responses from our viewers.
At a glance, our clear tasks consisted of forming the tone of our message which was centred around generating sympathy for the plight of disadvantaged children. Another immediate point of action I was responsible for overseeing included the designing of our digital content. This was crucial and I had to be there to monitor the quality of our content as our campaign was heavily reliant on compelling, meaningful visuals.
In order to keep the project running smoothly, we had sought to commence the design process swiftly as requested by the client. Being able to utilise stock, royalty free images aided us greatly in producing emotional graphics for online circulation and the end result of this can be viewed below.
In addition to the graphics, my clients then provided me with a small budget to help promote the campaign via social media in a bid to rouse further curiosity and attract additional donations. We had agreed to give each attempt at running paid ads a period of 2 weeks before tweaking any re-running ads.
While running our ads, I also looked to gain real-world attention by managing to book an appearance on ‘Living the Life’ a variety show on the Islam Channel for Mukhtar, one of Hope Kitchen’s co-founders. A video of Mukhtar’s appearance can be viewed below.
Overall, from continuously running our ads and booking interviews and appearances for Mukhtar, we were ultimately able to generate over £3000 pound of small scale donations from our viewers.
The money generated, had then then gone towards a somewhat clever arrangement in which HopeKitchen agreed with UK supermarkets to purchase surplus food at a heavily discounted price and selling them for profit to primary school at affordable prices.