Jemma Sullivan, senior brand manager and Emma Hetherington, head of content and news, Diabetes UK Visit the CharityComms website to view slides from past events, see what events we have coming up and to check out what else we do: www.charitycomms.org.uk

1. Co-creating content with real people
in your stories
Emma Hetherington – Head of Content & News
Jemma Sullivan – Senior Manager, Brand & Creative

2. Making the invisible visible

4. “Nothing external reflects the
enormity of this condition. We
didn’t grow wings on diagnosis day.
No such magic. Diabetes gave us
only one gift – its invisibility – which
is as much a curse as a blessing”
- Claire Rogers, blogger

12. Reaching people with stories to tell
• Focus groups
• Front line
• Crowd sourcing

13. Focus group approach

15. Tone Copy Visuals Calls to action

16. Principles for creative development
• Not to shock people into action…but to raise a question in our audience’s mind
• Highlight something that is relevant to their own story (= blood glucose levels of
48, the 15 healthcare essentials) that nudges them to think “this is something I
need to think about”
• Be action oriented, positive, non-judgmental
• Be clear about how we can help – prevent versus protect
• Include someone like them in the ad
• Be visual – text based ads did not engage

20. • We drove over a million people to our website, against an initial
target of 75,000 and an updated target of 800,000 based on
industry benchmarks
• 66% of these were new to Diabetes UK
• 26% conversion result against a target of 20% based on typical
website performance
Campaign results

21. From the front line – being in clinic

23. Crowdsourcing content

31. • By giving the campaign over to the diabetes community, we smashed
our targets receiving over 400% more book orders than we had
projected (benchmarking against 28 charities)
• Email opt in rate of 58% versus target of 37%
• Membership conversion rate of 14% versus target of 7%
Campaign results

32. What we’re learning

33. • Get close to the people whose stories you want to tell – what
they say may surprise you
• Try out different co-creation methods
• Make it easy for people to find ‘someone like me’
• Test & learn as you go
• Keep listening and keep learning
Co-creation works

35. The power of human stories:
how to be an authentic storyteller
28 February 2019
London
#CharityStories

36. Visit the CharityComms website to view
slides from past events, see what events
we have coming up and to check out
what else we do:
www.charitycomms.org.uk