Intro
Comic Relief was set up by comedians and uses comedy and laughter to get serious messages across, as well as making sure that everyone can have some fun at the same time. Over the years, more than 2050 celebrities have given their time and talent to Comic Relief, including Lenny Henry, Billy Connolly, John Cleese, Jerry Springer, Johnny Depp, Ali G, Davina McCall, Robbie Williams, Steve Coogan, Paul Whitehouse, Whoopi Goldberg and Woody Allen. Top comedy teams who've given a lorry-load of laughs while helping raise a lot of cash include the League of Gentlemen, The Fast Show and Smack the Pony.
For the second year running Comic Relief are doing Sports Relief. Sports Relief raises money through celebrities and the public doing sporting events. As a central theme Sports Relief organizes local one mile runs that people can take part in to raise money for the cause. Sports Relief has large support from the BBC and runs trails between programs to promote the events. These trails are short and because they reach such a wide audience it is very hard to make sure that each viewer and listener gets the information that they need to know. If viewers and listeners do not take down the website location or do not know where their local event is then precious sponsorship can be missed. Sports Relief realizes the need for each advertisement to interact with the viewer and deliver them specific information relevant to their situation.
Jonathon Ross asks the nation to text in
Sports Relief uses smARTebusiness’s ‘Find Your Nearest’ software. ‘Find Your Nearest’ allows Sports Relief to put the following information on their advertisements:
Text ‘Mile’ followed by your postcode to 8181
Texts cost 25p plus your normal network charge.
The advertisements are frequently placed before Eastenders, the Ten O’clock and the World Cup coverage.
When viewers text in their postcodes they are immediately sent their nearest local mile and instructions on how to register for the events. Each text in is sent back using the 25p premium text route and this generates incremental charity donations for Sports Relief. As the events become closer in the calendar the reply text message encourages people to donate and how to do so.
Sports Relief local miles change constantly as new events are set up by willing volunteers. These are easily added to the list using the intuitive ‘Find Your Nearest’ control panel which allows updates on the fly. The control panel also allows the reply message to be edited putting Sports Relief in control at all time.
During the campaign Sports Relief require extensive reporting to inform them of response rates. SmARTebusiness’s dedicated account manager on the project provides a report of the previous day’s activities for Sports Relief before their 10am morning meeting.
SmARTebusiness is an excellent
partner for Sports Relief as they specialise in digital
two way communication. SmARTebusiness are experts in
text message marketing and have the in house skills to
build applications to deliver campaigns. As forerunners
in the text marketing industry they also run competitions,
for example, recently for a large consumer brand within
Sainsbury’s.
SmARTebusiness can easily cope with the number of text messages sent in for the Sports Relief ‘Find Your Nearest’ project. Each day thousands of people text in to see where their nearest mile is.
The text message sent back is a personal record for each person on how to enter the events. BBC advertisements can now reach out from the TV and Radio and deliver a customized response to each viewer and listener.
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