Slides from Remarkables talk at Activate 2018

No agency required: Design your own remarkable campaigns

Have you seen a creative campaign and thought, “If only I could afford an agency to design a campaign like that for me!” The good news is you don’t have to pay a fancy agency or be struck by lightening to think up remarkable ideas.

This is a crash course in campaign innovation where you’ll learn practical techniques for igniting creative and innovative thinking. You’ll take away three surefire methods for kickstarting the creative process and designing head-turning campaigns of your own.

Keine Notizen für die Folie

This is a photo from February 2004, when San Francisco City Hall began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The California Supreme Court halted the practice on March 11, but, during that month, there were huge queues outside of City Hall of same-sex couples waiting to get hitched. We heard the story of an office in Minnesota that sent a bouquet of flowers to a random same-sex couple waiting in line. We thought this was a great gesture, but also expensive for supporters who wanted to participate but couldn’t afford the $100 to send a bouquet.

Darren hacked together a website that pooled small donations of 5 and 10 dollars. That way, flowers could be ordered and delivered in bulk, making it possible for people to donate much smaller amounts than the cost of a bouquet. In just 10 days, Flowers for Al and Don raised almost $15,000. And, our first Internet meme was born. I should note that if we’d been really thinking, we’d have parlayed this experience into inventing Kickstarter in 2004. But, we did have a takeaway.

Draw as dinosaur

High impact campaigns that capture attention and inspire supports and donors to engage and act.

Safe is risky and risky is safe.

Remarkables get noticed. They’re not just another Facebook post, newsletter or fundraising ask letter. They cut through that noise. They tell a story in a way that gets heard. They’re sharable and they can even touch us emotionally. Here are some examples.

People from the same org should be in the same group

Simple is better for campaign

Described the ’win state’ or desired outcome for the campaign.

Bias toward specificity in the audience

Ideal world, it wouldn’t be a campaign around a political candidate, but it can be.

JS
I loved this campaign from Romania. A cancer charity devised a clever way to inspire women to donate their hair for wigs for cancer patients. They invented the 'Brave Cut', a version of an asymmetrical haircut, and had local salons offer it for free.

They combined the idea of wearing a pink ribbon with a haircut. So, the brave cut became the pink ribbon you wear all the time.

DB
You can make a splash with a great idea, simply executed. Look at Cape Breton if Trump Wins, which earned tons of media attention, over 800,000 site visitors and a shoutout from President Obama. All with an $8/month Squarespace site and photos of some comely Nova Scotians.

Defer judgmentQuantity over qualityStart broad and then bucket ideasAfter bucketing, we apply real-world constraints to these ideas. Yes, and...Diverge and then converge

Other techniques that we use