2015 marked a decade of Active Kids and to celebrate the occasion Sainsbury's approached Yard with a brief to engage parents, children and organisations across the UK. The overall objective was to raise as much awareness of the campaign as possible amongst the target audience of parents of young children, with a view to increasing the number of vouchers donated.
What is Active Kids?
The annual Sainsbury's Active Kids campaign aims to encourage children to lead happier, healthier and more active lifestyles, by offering Active Kids vouchers which shoppers can collect and donate to local schools and youth groups. The vouchers can then be exchanged for items from a wide range of sports and cooking equipment.
What did we propose?
We suggested a targeted blogger outreach campaign, where carefully selected influencers would be approached and encouraged to discuss the benefits of an active and healthy lifestyle with their readers.
We planned to maximise shares and visibility of this outreach campaign by offering the selected bloggers the opportunity to run giveaways for their readers, hosted on their sites. These giveaways offered the opportunity to win pieces of autographed Active Kids merchandise, such as a football signed by Liverpool player and Active Kids ambassador, Daniel Sturridge. There were also a number of Sainsbury's vouchers up for grabs.
All of our campaigns focus on building long-term, lasting relationships between our clients and the bloggers that we approach, with proven success across a range of sectors, including finance, retail and insurance industries. We create bespoke processes for each new client to ensure that any planned campaign will meet their specific requirements and that all of our communications adhere to strict standards.
We also guarantee that all of our communications will remain transparent, with our clients owning all elements of any campaign - including the contacts; complete communication history; and most important of all, the relationships that have been built with influencers. This agreement and ownership of relations is incredibly important for organisations like Sainsbury's, who regularly wish to reach out to individuals between specific campaigns.
At Yard, we pride ourselves on our excellent track record in sourcing and securing high-level influencers, who are genuinely excited about getting involved in the projects we have selected them for. Our thorough vetting processes ensure that any sites we recruit for a campaign are relevant and on brand - protecting the client's brand identity and message.
For the Active Kids campaign, we sourced a number of the UK's most prominent family bloggers, who we considered to be ideal fits for the campaign based on factors such as their audiences, brand suitability and the potential for exposure.
Our criteria for selecting these bloggers were as follows:
- They had to encourage and promote an active lifestyle, through diet and exercise.
- They needed to have a strong social media presence, and they had to be on brand.
- Their children had to be the correct age for the Active Kids campaign (school age) and be active.
By following these guidelines, we were able to ensure that we only engaged with relevant, high-quality bloggers who were keen to get involved with the campaign as genuine ambassadors of Active Kids.
We started by contacting our chosen bloggers to gauge interest. Thanks to the aforementioned selection process which has been perfected over years of managing outreach campaigns, we were able to engage 96% of our chosen bloggers straightaway. Once a relationship had been established, the bloggers were provided with information packs and encouraged to discuss the benefits of an active and healthy lifestyle with their readers.
All of our bloggers produced blog posts describing the types of activities that they and their families took part in, along with advice from both themselves and from Sainsbury's on how to encourage children of all ages to be more active.
Our influencers also shared their posts and details of the competitions they were running on their social platforms - encouraging their followers to read, enter and share. This hugely increased the visibility of the campaign, reaching not only the bloggers' followers but their friends and families as well.
The results for the Active Kids campaign far exceeded our expectations and those of our client. Over the two-month period, twenty of the UK's most prominent family blogs hosted the competitions. Each of the blog posts also promoted the Active Kids site, with the individual bloggers sharing with their readers their own views on why children should be encouraged to keep active.
We gave our influencers the opportunity to offer extra competition entries to people who tweeted about the giveaway or who submitted a Twitter or Facebook link showing their collected vouchers. As a result, we were able to ensure that word of the competitions - and therefore of the campaign itself - would also reach an audience not linked to the bloggers' readers.
By April 2015, when the outreach campaign ended, the blogger activity had generated a cumulative total of:
- 31,508 competition entries
- 5,501 blog comments
- 24,748 Tweets
- 664,701 reach
The total number of impressions measured was 2,062,841 - a result our client was understandably thrilled with. Given the target demographic of our selected bloggers, it's no surprise that this uplift in social media shares engaged parents across the country, and increased awareness of Active Kids.
In total, the outreach campaign contributed to a result of £11 million worth of equipment and experiences being donated to UK schools and kids' clubs in 2015 - an amazing result.
