Working with Glimpse and Help Refugees to validate the impact of a positive message
Opening at a prime Soho location on Black Friday, the Choose Love pop up shop offered a thoughtful twist on the usual pre-Christmas shopping spree. At the store, you could spend as much as you wanted (up to £500) but you would leave with nothing. All the gifts shoppers bought were donated to refugees in camps across Europe. The store was stocked with practical items like tents, space blankets, warm clothes, boots and food. By offering a positive, practical way to engage with the plight of thousands of refugees, Choose Love sparked massive interest among shoppers, celebrity supporters who took shifts at the shop and journalists looking for a twist to the usual Christmas commerce stories.
Signify are proud to have been involved in a small way with this amazing campaign. Glimpse and Help Refugees asked us to measure the online impact of their pop-up Christmas store – and the results demonstrate the power of a positive message.
Signify’s task was to measure the impact of the campaign online. The headline figures were remarkable – with the Choose Love message reaching over 190 million social media accounts via more than 45,000 original posts on social media. The campaign was shared much more widely than Christmas campaigns from Shelter and Save the Children, despite the fact that those campaigns had in-built support from thousands of donors. Over the festive period, the share of voice for this campaign was more than 20% of the total footprint of UK charities.
More interesting still was the underlying behaviour of people who shared the Choose Love campaign and wrote about it. We looked at more than 400,000 posts by people supporting various UK charities over the festive period. People supporting the Christmas campaigns of other charities tended to use the language of crisis, and they were much less likely to share the campaign at all. By contrast, because participation in the Choose Love campaign meant telling people about a cool and inspiring pop-up shop that they should visit in Soho, supporters were more than one hundred times as likely to ‘share’ the campaign on their public feed. This exactly demonstrates the power of the Glimpse ethos; giving people a positive way to think about and engage with problems, no matter how serious those problems are.
Read Signify's Choose Love Digital Impact Report
Signify are proud to have worked with Help Refugees and with Glimpse, and to have supported such an innovative and effective campaign. We’re also excited to see the value of a positive, proactive approach in tackling one of the worst situations in Europe. We need more of this kind of thing!
Glimpse are a new collective for creative people who want to use their skills to support of environmental and social causes by finding new and exciting ways to think about hard problems. Read more about their work here. And please follow Signify on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.