Raising Awareness and Equity for a New Brand

THE CLIENT

Give Dangerously

WHAT WE DID

Stakeholder consultation & engagement
Audience research & engagement
Storytelling & strategy
Experience & interpretive design
Engagement strategy & implementation
Lead generation & data collection

Brand experience strategy for Give Dangerously

Give Dangerously (GD) is one of the biggest single donors in Singapore. Its philanthropic work is rooted in a Singaporean family’s giving legacy. In addition to philanthropy, GD aims to promote a culture of giving in Singapore, as it believes that a kind and supportive society strengthens social connections and forges community resilience.

When the foundation started in 2018, it was brand new to Singaporeans. So, it wanted to raise its visibility and trust among its target audience, who are young people aged 18 to 35.

HOL helped GD build up its brand from scratch with a years-long partnership that consisted of many brand experiences, including a book, physical exhibition, virtual experience, phygital experience and visual novel. These experiences spread its message of giving and nudged young people closer to paying it forward.

IMPACT

visitors to the physical, digital and
phygital experiences

0 +

Reached global users

including from the US, China
and Canada

204

seconds per session
(industry average: 120 seconds)

We raised GD’s visibility with targeted physical, digital and phygital experiences that met its audience where they are. These experiences reached a combined audience of over 100,00 people, raising GD’s brand awareness among Singaporeans.

Creatively strategised and executed, GD’s experiences earned recognition as a finalist in the MARKies Awards 2021 for Most Creative Campaign Pivot and Most Creative Customer Engagement.

Youtube

SUMMARY

Knowing, liking and trusting a new brand

Through tailored physical, digital and phygital experiences that would especially appeal to young people, we shared GD’s mission, message of giving and its impact with over 100,000 Singaporeans. Without hard selling, we planted the seed of paying it forward in them and raised their awareness of and trust in the GD brand.

ABOUT THE CLIENT

Give Dangerously

GD, established in 2018, arose from a Singaporean family’s history of philanthropy. Its story begins with a serendipitous meeting between two men at the Zion Road Hawker Centre over plates of char kway teow, the Singaporean hawker noodle dish. They forged a deep, lifelong friendship that eventually led to philanthropic giving.

GD supports many causes, including healthcare, education and community development. It also aims to foster a culture of giving among young people.

Challenge

Getting to know and
trust a new brand

As a brand-new initiative that evolved from private giving, GD found it harder to fulfil its mission of encouraging giving among young people. We needed to raise GD’s brand awareness and equity as the first step to building trust.
“Pay it forward” is GD’s key message to its target audience. However, this message had yet to resonate with young people when we started our partnership. To raise awareness and build trust, we also had the added challenge of aligning what GD wanted to convey with what its target audience thought about giving.

Insights and Strategy

Planting the seed of
paying it forward

We conducted stakeholder research with the client, its target audience and its beneficiaries. From GD, we found out about its objectives and understood what it wanted to stand for and strived to achieve.

From GD’s target audience, we uncovered their needs, wants and resistance to giving. They tended to associate giving with money and viewed it as something only successful people would do.

Hence, our strategy was planting the seed of paying it forward in young people instead of persuading them to give. We didn’t want to turn them off by sounding preachy; we would simply want them to consider giving when they are ready to do so.

We also heard the beneficiaries’ stories, which helped us better empathise with them and let us appreciate GD’s impact more deeply. That was why we decided to let GD’s good work speak for itself through the beneficiaries’ stories as we sought to raise awareness of the GD brand.

Solution

Credibility from the ground up

Expanding reach virtually

Gamified micro-experiences

Targeted engagement

Book and physical exhibition: GD was a new brand even though the family had had a long history of philanthropy. To raise awareness, we began with a book and a physical exhibition, both of which lent a solid foundation of brand credibility and helped perpetuate the giving family’s story.

The exhibition travelled to different institutes of higher learning (IHLs) in Singapore for two reasons: to reach out to and build trust with its target audience at IHLs and to promote GD’s scholarships.

For both the book and the physical exhibition, we centred the narrative around the personal stories of GD’s beneficiaries and GD’s impact on them. So the target audience could see for themselves the positive effects of giving. This was our first step in planting the seed of paying it forward.

Virtual exhibition: The physical exhibition would likely be discontinued one day. To ensure that GD’s mission and message continued to spread, we strategised and implemented a virtual experience that allowed users to view the exhibition on their mobile devices and desktops.

In terms of content, we first expanded the target audience’s definition of giving to dispel the myth that doing good only involved donating money. We conveyed the message that giving could also be about giving time or energy or simply lending a listening ear. And that was why they too were in a position to help and give.

We used gamification to entice the target audience to interact with GD’s message. This sowed the seeds of giving subtly but memorably. The calls to action in the virtual experience encouraged the target audience to simply think about giving rather than demanding that they give.

The virtual experience was launched with an online giveaway to encourage the target audience to engage with the virtual experience and generate leads. We also carried out a blitz on Instagram. GD’s IG posts aimed to plant the idea of giving by relating it to the audience’s daily struggles and sharing the many ways they could give.

Scale the summit of Mount Everest in our interactive storytelling experience

Phygital experience: For the second round of GD’s physical exhibition at several IHLs, we increased the fun and engagement with a phygital element: gamified micro-experiences accessed by scanning QR codes placed around the physical exhibition.

The games helped the audience understand the content more easily and retain the information better. The phygital element also helped GD increase its cool quotient with its target audience.

Targeted engagement: We rounded out GD’s brand experience with other targeted engagement through various digital channels where its target audience hung out:

branded stickers for Telegram and WhatsApp that the target audience could use daily so that the foundation’s message stayed top of mind
a non-fungible token (NFT) minted for a small-scale Valentine’s Day campaign to raise awareness of the GD’s mission among young people
a visual novel that tells the Char Kway Teow Legacy story in a format popular with the target audience

Dear Angeline and team, I posed to you a difficult challenge – changing the minds of young people to embrace giving as part of their lives. This challenge required invoking empathy in a society like Singapore, where people are getting more well-off and increasingly self-centred. Your strong understanding of audience psychology and your expertise in delivering emotive experiences have allowed you to pass with flying colours. Once again, thank you for making this project a huge success.

Mr HH Tan

Founder and Managing Director
GiveDangerously

The memory game in the Healthcare section really piqued my interest. I put in my utmost effort to remember everything. At the end, I realised how this could be challenging for dementia patients. I sincerely hope that LKCMedicine would have breakthrough research to improve the lives of the elderly.

Sam Tan

My favourite part was the introduction to The Char Kway Teow Legacy. No matter how many times I read it, I found it amazing that this started from a plate of char kway teow and an affinity between 2 strangers with a 38-year age gap.

Giving dangerously to me means giving in whatever way we can to help whoever is in need, without hoping to receive anything in return. It can be the smallest action but to the receiving end, it is the largest gift.

Lyvonne Lau

“Values are caught, not taught” – just as this exhibition was meant to be experienced and not just seen. My kids had so much fun with the Mount Everest Expedition experience that we kept reviewing it over and over again … My whole family looks forward to future virtual exhibitions!

Neo Hui Kun

Gifts and donations were not well publicised in the past. I am almost 50 years. But it’s only now that I’ve learnt so much about giving. I felt like crying. Thank you so much for the exhibition.

Thia Fong Yee