1. Digital campaigning: effective & simple
Nick Watts
PR, social media & Fundraising consultancy
www.nickjwatts.com | nick@nickjwatts.com

2. Digital Campaigning
Digital campaigning is a great way of adding that something extra to any
campaign you run. It is not intended as a replacement to what we have been
doing since day one, but more of a way to build on your existing campaigns
and creating a larger, more focused audience.
• It doesn’t need to be complicated
• It doesn’t need to take up all your time
• It can add that extra dimension to your
campaign
• It can increase your engagement and
reach more people
So here are my top tips to create a small
digital campaign…

3. Creating your digital campaign
THE IDEA THE PLAN EXECUTION COLLATION EVALUTION
• What? • The Strategy • Launch • Collect all • Did it
• How? • Platforms • Talk the content work?
• Where? • The Media • Share • Collate in a • How did it
• Design • Build your fun way work?
• Research community • Create your • What we
• Bloggers campaign did well?
‘storybook’ • What we
could do
better?

4. Top tips
• Keep it simple – Content wins over flashy ways to engage people.
• Choose a few platforms – Don’t try to be everywhere, concentrate on
making a select few brilliant.
• Research - make a small list of your supporters and bloggers
interested in your topic and get in touch with them before the launch,
get them involved in the launch and campaign.
• Strategy – It doesn’t need to be 100 pages long! Just a simple plan
• Be social – Talk and build your community around the topic of your
campaign, ask people’s opinions, encourage participation.
• Collect – use collation tools to bring your campaign to life, to tell your
story and to create a place people can go back to.
• Evaluate – Use simple metrics, how many people did we talk too?
Were the conversations positive?

5. Keeping it simple
You can have the flashiest campaign in the world but without good
content you will not get your message across.
Spend time working on the copy of what you are trying to say. In the
social space keep it concise and fun, one of the most important things to
remember, it is still called ‘social media’, so keep it social and fun!
Create conversations around the campaign you are working on as using
social media spaces as a stream of links does not utilise the spaces to
their full potential.
You don’t need to be on 100 different networks to make it work, choose a
few and master them, build the audiences in those spaces and create a
tight community people will use to talk and share.

6. Engaging your community
Before you launch your campaign engaging your existing ambassadors
and bloggers interested in your sector can be a powerful way to achieve
that ‘buzz’ around your digital campaign.
Be open and transparent, tell them what you are doing and put in a call
to action, for instance;
• Would you like to be one of our bloggers?
• Would you share this status?
• Will you share this content?
This works the same with traditional campaigns, we may send them a
letter with posters and a call for action, why not include something about
digital in your traditional communications too?

7. Strategy
This could be just a couple of pages long but it is really useful to have a
plan of how you will execute the campaign. Think about the kind of
things we need to consider;
• Where will be be? (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube)
• How will it work? ( We email our ambassadors, Ambassadors post
their videos to YouTube, we then ask our community on Facebook
and Twitter about them, create a conversation around the topic and
encourage people to share the content)
• How will we collect it? (Monitor tags on Youtube, share on our
networks, collate the conversations around it on an application such
as storify)
• Who will do it?
• How do we measure it? (How do we judge the success of our
campaign, ie. we use video views as an indicator of reach and then
count the number of people talking about the topic, were the
conversations positive? What views did we have on the website or
blog? Did they go up?)

8. Keep it social
Simple & social are my two main points in any campaign. It could be
something as simple as a photo engagement, encourage people to snap
photos and share them.
Use things that are engaging and conversational, ask the opinions of
your network, don’t talk at your supporters and ambassadors, make
each and every one of them feel like a contributor, because they are!

9. Telling your story
A good campaign is one thing, but telling the story and bringing it to life
can add a whole new dimension to it!
Not only can you use all the conversations around your campaign to
write user generated stories, but it also provides a collection of material
to use in the future, as well as a record of how that campaign went.
Use tools such as Storify to collect the conversations around your
campaign and tell the story through the voice of your ambassadors and
supporters.
Blog about it, invite your ambassadors onto your blog to write for you
about their experiences.

10. How did we do?
We all need to evaluate the success of our campaigns.
Social media reporting is still ‘one of those things’. I personally am not a
big fan of numbers, I believe that you can have 10 followers that share
and interact with everything you do, and they will be more valuable than
1,000 empty followers.
Look at the quality of conversation around your campaign, was it
positive? How much was content shared? How many different people
were talking about your campaign?
Did we share links? If so, how do the analytics look?
It does not need to be full of complicated graphs, we can look at it much
more realistically and build a picture of what we did well and what could
be improved.

11. So there you go!
These are just a few ways you can make digital
campaigns simple and effective, with some best
practice thrown in!
Why not give some ideas a try next time you plan a
digital campaign! I would love to here from you if you
have any questions, comments or would like a little bit
of advice on your campaign…
Nick Watts
PR, social media & Fundraising consultancy
+44 (0)1865 589 200
nick@nickjwatts.com
www.nickjwatts.com