The Zoological Society of London is an international conservation charity working to create a world where wildlife thrives. During the pandemic, with their zoos forced to close, ZSL ran an emergency coronavirus appeal that brought in over 26,000 new low-level donors. When the zoos reopened, the challenge became clear: how do you hold onto that new audience before they drift away?
The Brief
ZSL invited us to pitch for work to develop, test and build a new digital regular giving product — something that would turn those new donors into committed, long-term supporters. We were delighted to win it.
The Work
We started by reviewing ZSL's existing insights to get under the skin of their audience and identify the real opportunity areas. From there, we looked at what would genuinely motivate these donors and developed three different propositions to test.
We ran two rounds of testing with their warm audience — a Zoom workshop and a survey — to understand which themes landed best. Those insights shaped the final product, which we named Back from the Brink.
The idea: sign up as a regular giver and receive exclusive behind-the-scenes videos and stories about how ZSL are protecting endangered wildlife across London Zoo, Whipsnade Zoo and their conservation projects around the world. We created all the monthly email content in-house — editing and producing the final videos from footage supplied by ZSL, and bringing in our copywriter to produce the articles.
For the roll-out, we produced a full suite of assets: website banners, email templates, promotional videos and social ads. ZSL also had capacity to create some assets internally, so we built them a creative and messaging toolkit to keep everything consistent across formats and platforms.
The Results
We tested the product, used the insights to refine the creative and messaging, and incorporated elements from ZSL's recent rebrand. The campaign is now live in market.