The Char Kway Teow Legacy Experience

GiveDangerously

The Char Kway Teow Legacy Experience

Strategising a 360 experience to build brand awareness and equity for a new brand

GiveDangerously (GD) is one of the biggest single donors in Singapore, rooted in a Singaporean family’s giving legacy. When the foundation started in 2018, it was brand new to its target audience and Singaporeans in general.

HOL helped the foundation build up its brand from zero and spread the message of giving among young people and nudge them closer to paying it forward.

The partnership consisted of physical exhibitions, a book, virtual experience, phygital experience, virtual launch, social media campaign and branded sticker pack.

What we did

Stakeholder research and engagement
Experience strategy
Branding strategy
Engagement strategy
Content strategy
Interpretative strategy
Activation strategy
Gamification strategy
Social media strategy
Physical and virtual implementation
Project management
Engagement data collection
Lead generation

Challenges

Brand awareness fosters trust. As a brand-new foundation that evolved out of private giving, GD would find it harder to fulfil its mission of encouraging giving among people aged 18 to 35. We needed to build GD’s brand awareness and equity.

Insights and strategy

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

From GD’s target audience – young people 18 to 35 – 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. GD’s message of giving didn’t resonate with them. Hence, instead of persuading young people to give, planting the seed of giving in them was more critical. We wouldn’t want to turn them off by sounding preachy; we would simply want them to consider the prospect of giving.

We also spent much time with the beneficiaries to hear their stories. Not only did their stories help us better empathise with them, we also appreciated GD’s impact more deeply. And 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.

Solutions

Book and physical exhibition

GD was a new brand even though the family had had a long history of philanthropy. A book lends credibility and helps perpetuate the giving family’s story.

Additionally, as the family had been donating to institutes of higher learning (IHLs), GD could easily reach young people at IHLs. A physical exhibition at these IHLs helped GD raise awareness and gain trust among its target audience.

For both the book and the physical exhibition, we centred the narrative around the impact of giving, so the target audience could see for themselves the possibilities of helping others.

Virtual experience

The physical exhibition will likely be discontinued one day. To ensure that GD’s mission and message continue to spread, we strategised and implemented a virtual experience that would allow 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 and detached the giving message from money – giving could be in terms of time, energy, or simply a listening ear.

The team then used gamification to entice users to interact with GD’s message to sow the seeds of giving subtly but memorably. The calls to action in the virtual experience encouraged users to simply think about giving rather than demanding that they give.

Virtual launch

GD needed to engage its target audience on the platforms where they usually are. We launched the virtual experience 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.

Phygital experience

For the second round of GD’s physical exhibition at several IHLs, we increased the fun and engagement with a phygital element. By scanning QR codes placed around the physical exhibition, the audience could access interactive mini games that would help them understand the content more easily and retain the information better. These games also helped GD up its cool quotient with its young target audience.

Other engagement elements:

branded stickers for Telegram and WhatsApp that our 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 foundation’s mission among young people

Impact

“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