Connecting with a new generation of supporters

The Story

Guide Dogs helps 200,000 people in the UK with sight loss, giving them the confidence and practical support to live life to the full. The charity’s ambition is to extend its services to 500,000 people by 2023.

The Challenge

To realise this ambition, Guide Dogs needed a new wave of supporters. The charity was engaging well with women over 35; however, research showed that younger generations felt no connection with the cause. We set out to change this by creating an agile social media strategy that would connect and retain 25-34-year-olds and also reach and engage with more men.

The Approach

We started by identifying what our target audience were already interested in and homed in on the topics that were relevant to the world of Guide Dogs.

Content had previously focused on the challenges of living with blindness. We wanted to shift the conversation from “how blind people cope” to celebrating the positive, life-affirming stories of how sight loss doesn’t prevent people from achieving their goals with Guide Dogs’ support.

We focus on creating fun, high-octane content and one of our top performing pieces was a video series showing how visually impaired people play sport at top levels. We travelled around the UK filming inspirational people, including a Team GB cyclist, a member of England’s blind football squad and a cricket captain.

We work in a small agile team, testing, learning and reacting to content performance. Every month we identify the key successes and development areas, and feed insights into the creation of next month’s social calendar.

The Results

25% year-on-year audience growth on social media

x2 engagement on Facebook in 2018

-50% unliking/unfollowing on Facebook in 2018

19% to 46% male audience on Facebook growth

25 - 34 age group is now the biggest audience segment on social

Guide Dogs moved from 15th (2016) to third (2018) for Top Buzz Ranking in the YouGov Charity