Breast Cancer Ireland - Paid Social Case Study

TESTIMONIAL

“First and foremost this morning I wanted to say thank you so much for all your help and support in the lead up to this year’s Great Pink Run. It has taken courage, creativity and determination ...and WE did it and have had our biggest bumper year yet!!! With the final tally close - at the moment we are about to surpass €900,000 raised to support our critical research programmes… We have clocked up over 65,208km this weekend - turning the globe pink from midday on Sunday, with over 14,500 people registered.”

Aisling Hurley, CEO of Breast Cancer Ireland

WOLFGANG DIGEST

Created a digital-first strategy to help BCI turn their Great Pink Run into a virtual event during Covid-19, which ended up being their most successful year ever for sign-ups and revenue.

CHANNELS

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Website

BUSINESS GROWTH

€960,000 raised in total, with €547,000 coming from online donations.

49% increase YoY and 157% above target.

THE CHALLENGE

The Great Pink Run is Breast Cancer Ireland's biggest fundraising event of the year, usually taking place across multiple locations in Ireland and attracting thousands of participants. However, with Covid-19 in full force, there was no option but to take 2020's run online as a virtual race. How we were going to encourage people to sign up to, participate in and talk about the run without the fun and camaraderie of an in-person race? On top of that, multiple charities had done exactly the same thing earlier in the year, to the point the "virtual run" concept was completely saturated. How were we going to make the Great Pink Run new and exciting? The challenge was on!

OUR STRATEGY

To encourage people to sign up for the run, we created one common goal: turn the world pink for Breast Cancer Ireland! We set people the challenge of running a full circumference of the world (equivalent to 47,000km) in just 48 hours, which meant we needed 10,000 people to run 5k. This would create the incentive people needed to get involved and the sense of excitement and togetherness that a virtual event might lack.

Great Pink Run social ad

We set to work on creating a digital first strategy made up of 4 key elements:

Strong creative concept: We created a globe for the Great Pink Run website that would turn pink as people logged their kilometres.
Use of influencer and ambassadors: We teamed up with multiple high-profile influencers and ambassadors in the weeks leading up to the race to get the word out and communicate our goal.
User Generated Content: UGC was vital to create that sense of community and togetherness! We repurposed photos of those participating, and live posted images of everyone taking part all through the weekend of the Great Pink Run.
Strong remarketing campaign: Once someone had engaged with us on social, visited the website or signed up for the race, we continued to target them, encouraging them to sign up if they hadn’t already, donate, share their photos or use our hashtag on the day.

INNOVATION USED

In order to bring the concept of “turning the world pink for Breast Cancer Ireland” to life, we created a globe and kilometre tracker for the Great Pink Run website. As people logged their kilometres, they could watch as the globe turned pink in front of their eyes! They could also see how many kms had been tracked and how many were left to go before we reached our goal, which served as a great incentive for others to take part.

Use of influencers and ambassadors also saw our levels of engagement skyrocket, while live posting UGC photos on the weekend of the run resulted in more than 30,000 interactions with our hashtag.

BUSINESS GROWTH

2020 was the most successful Great Pink Run event Breast Cancer Ireland has had to date!

Amount raised: €960,000 in total, with €547,000 of that coming from online donations. This was 254% above target and an increase of 49% YoY.
Number of registrations: 15,000. This was 200% above target, and an increase of 47% YoY.
Distance ran: 72.5k kilometres. We ran MORE than a full circumference of the globe - 1.8 times, to be precise!