St Helena Hospice partnered with Blake Mark Productions to increase awareness of volunteering opportunities and encourage more local people to support the hospice.
Using a carefully planned Meta advertising campaign built around authentic storytelling, creative testing and continuous optimisation, the campaign generated a significant increase in volunteer applications while maintaining excellent advertising efficiency.
St Helena Hospice wanted to recruit more volunteers from across north east Essex through a targeted Meta advertising campaign.
While the hospice already benefited from an incredible community of over 900 volunteers supporting a wide range of services, attracting new volunteers remained an ongoing priority. Many local people simply weren’t aware of the variety of volunteering opportunities available or assumed they didn’t have the right skills or experience.
The objective of the campaign was to increase awareness of volunteering, encourage more people to visit the volunteer recruitment pages and ultimately generate more volunteer applications through paid social advertising.
Volunteer recruitment requires a different approach to many other advertising campaigns.
Unlike someone searching for a product or service, prospective volunteers are rarely actively looking to give their time. The campaign therefore needed to build interest before encouraging action.
Rather than relying on generic recruitment adverts, we developed a series of Meta campaigns featuring real St Helena volunteers from a variety of roles across the organisation.
The creative focused on authentic people, welcoming messaging and the diversity of volunteering opportunities available, helping local audiences see that volunteering could fit around their own skills, interests and availability.
Multiple audiences, creative variations and messaging approaches were tested throughout the campaign, allowing us to continually optimise performance based on real user behaviour.
Authenticity sat at the heart of the campaign.
Rather than relying on stock photography or generic recruitment messaging, the creative featured real volunteers representing a broad range of roles across the hospice.
Multiple creative concepts were developed and tested throughout the campaign, each exploring different messaging and visual approaches.
Testing different creative variations allowed campaign decisions to be driven by performance data rather than opinion, enabling continual optimisation throughout the campaign.
The strongest-performing creative combined a simple headline with a collage of real volunteers from across the organisation, immediately communicating both the diversity of opportunities available and the welcoming nature of the hospice community.
This creative consistently delivered the strongest engagement throughout the campaign and became the foundation for ongoing optimisation.
By combining authentic creative, audience targeting and continuous optimisation, the campaign delivered strong volunteer recruitment results.
More importantly, the campaign helped introduce volunteering opportunities to thousands of people across the local community while providing St Helena Hospice with a significantly larger pool of prospective volunteers.
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Job Title, St Helena Hospice
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