SOCIAL MEDIA CASE STUDY: Vision 2020 Australia campaign – #SnapForSight

BACKGROUND:

Vision 2020 Australia is the country’s eye health and vision care peak body.

Its mission is to be the national advocate to government working in partnership with members for policy change and for the funding of programs that will eliminate avoidable blindness and vision impairment and ensure community participation of people who are blind or vision impaired in Australia and regional surrounds.

Vision 2020 Australia wanted to launch a social media campaign on ‘World Sight Day’ to help raise awareness of the importance of eye health.

The campaign – #SnapForSight – coincided with other eye health and vision care sector initiatives undertaken to mark the international day.

CAMPAIGN PLANNING:

When planning the campaign, members of its project management team were keen to check off four critical ‘boxes’:

1. The campaign message needed to be brutally simple to convey.
2. It needed to provide a timely reminder for Australians to get their eyes tested.
3. The call to action – what people were being asked to do – needed to be easy to grasp.
4. The hashtag needed to effectively ‘tell the story’ (and also be readily available to use, with no social ‘baggage’).

HOW THE CAMPAIGN WORKED:

Members of the public were encouraged to take a photo of something they cherished and share it using the hashtag #SnapForSight via their social network of choice – Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.

These images would then be aggregated on a #SnapForSight website for the public to check out (and share if they wished).

Timing-wise, #SnapForSight was ‘soft launched’ in the days running up to World Sight Day (which was on a Thursday) and trickled on for a week afterwards. However, the bulk of activity by the social media team was on the actual day itself.

CAMPAIGN GOALS:

• Ensure Vision 2020 Australia and its member organisations had a social presence on World Sight Day.
• Raise public awareness of the importance of eye health and the need for people to get their eyes checked regularly.
• Provide a communications platform that Vision 2020 Australia’s 50 member organisations (e.g. The Fred Hollows Foundation, Optometry Australia) could leverage for their own World Sight Day promotional activity.
• Engage Federal parliamentarians in the campaign, and to participate by sharing their own #SnapForSight photos via social media.
• Trend nationally on Twitter on the day of the launch.

KEY TACTICS EMPLOYED:

• Development of a campaign logo and visual identity to ensure a consistently strong visual presence across the multiple mediums employed.
• Creation of a campaign-specific microsite (www.snapforsight.com.au) incorporating social aggregation platform, Shuttlerock.
• Identification and preparation for potential reputational issues: What could go wrong, and how would we deal with such eventualities?
• Ongoing communication with Vision 2020 Australia’s member organisations to keep them abreast of the campaign and encouraging their involvement.
• Creation of a range of promotional social media ‘tiles’ (formatted specifically for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) and uploading them to Dropbox making it easy for the aforementioned members of Vision 2020 Australia to share visual campaign content via their social networks. These promotional tiles included pre-campaign countdown content (i.e. a Facebook visual stating ‘3 Days to go’ for #SnapForSight’)
• Communication with key social media influencers in advance of World Sight Day, prepping them on the issue of eye health and the goals of the campaign, and encouraging them to participate.

On the day of the launch, the social media team got to work; huddled together in the Vision 2020 Australia boardroom, they tweeted, Instagrammed and Facebooked all day – communicating with the social teams of the organisation’s members as well as participating individuals across social channels, with heavy emphasis on Twitter.

A Blab session involving social media consultants Trevor Young (i.e. my good self) and Dionne Lew, along with Vision 2020 Australia CEO, Jennifer Gersbeck – was streamed live on the day, in which the trio discussed the campaign and the broader issue of eye health. N.B. Video embedded below.

Selected traditional media outreach was also conducted to broaden the campaign message beyond just social media.

OUTCOMES:

According to Vision 2020 Australia’s communications manager, Louise Rudzki, the campaign exceeded all expectations, with a ‘potential reach’ of 2.9 million people on Twitter alone, and 14 million impressions. N.B. TweetReach was employed to measure the reach #SnapForSight had on Twitter; the organisers are fully cognisant 2.9 million people weren’t actually exposed to the campaign on Twitter, and that this number merely serves as a yardstick.

Overall, some 1500 Twitter posts mentioning #SnapForSight were published by 533 Twitter contributors, along with 320 Instagram posts. Unfortunately, while organisers were aware of a strong showing on Facebook – particularly on Vision 2020 Australia member pages – mentions of the campaign on people’s private Facebook accounts could not be measured.

Of note, the #SnapForSight hashtag trended on Twitter for Melbourne a couple of hours after launch, and was trending nationally by midday.

Overall, 417 published photos on the www.snapforsight.com.au microsite (aggregated using the Shuttlerock platform).

Importantly, a higher than expected number of parliamentarians participated in the campaign, with 31 individuals posting a video or a photo to Facebook and/or Twitter, including Dr Richard Di Natale, leader of the Australian Greens, and the Federal Minister for Health, Sussan Ley. (According to Louise, such political engagement is important for a peak body organisation such as Vision 2020 Australia).

News of the campaign was also picked up by Melbourne metropolitan media; editorial coverage included an interview with CEO Jennifer Gersbeck on Tom Elliott’s 3AW Drive program, and an article in the Herald Sun and Geelong Advertiser (included photo featuring Vision 2020 Australia Global Ambassador, Dr Jessica Gallagher).

Over 100 radio stations nationally also carried a news snippet of the campaign (distributed via Radio Release).

3 KEY LEARNINGS:

1. Keep everything simple! The project management team workshopped the concept relentlessly until it could be boiled down to one simple action.
2. Prepare participants and influencers in advance of the campaign, and continue to communicate with them on the day. The groundswell of support that came from this activity kickstarted the campaign and provided much-needed momentum on the day.
3. Make promotional social media collateral easily accessible for participants. Feedback from participating member organisations was that the promotional collateral provided made it a ‘no-brainer’ for them to get involved; these social tiles also made it easy for members of the public to share the promotional love with their networks of friends and followers.

TOOLS USED IN THE CAMPAIGN:

• Microsite
• Email
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Blab
• TweetReach

PROJECT MANAGEMENT:

• Louise Rudzki – communications manager, Vision 2020 Australia
• Leesa ClausenBrown – communications adviser , Vision 2020 Australia
• Dionne Lew – social media consultant
• Trevor Young – social media consultant
• Merryn Padgett – graphic designer, Earth & Sea Creative