Four steps to delivering successful purpose-driven campaigns, from Women's Health UK

Purpose-driven campaigns are a way for publications to demonstrate and act on their values, making a difference to their communities.

There are also benefits for publishers. Women's Health UK's editor-in-chief Claire Sanderson says brand recognition is one of the big wins, citing huge numbers of impressions for the magazine's recent campaigns as well as measurable real-world impact.

"It would be far too simplistic for us to just pump out fitness content constantly, we have to be seen as an intelligent and responsible brand that is trying to make a difference," says Sanderson, speaking on the Journalism.co.uk's podcast about the key steps for succeeding with this type of project.

Research, research, research

Most newsrooms in 2022 will already be conducting audience research to understand which issues their readers care about.

Developing purpose-driven campaigns simply brings a new step to the process: as well as using user research to guide editorial content, it can also be used to identify areas where the publication could work to create a positive difference.

These campaigns start with initial research, and when it became apparent that British women had extremely low levels of body confidence, Women's Health UK wanted to do something about it.

It started a campaign called In Shape My Shape back in 2016 and that found initial traction by putting empowering slogans in the magazine. That campaign then evolved into Project Body Love in 2018, as a Hearst UK company-wide, partner-supported initiative which is still running.

To decide how the campaign should look, the team used the Hearst UK panel (a representative group of readers) and focus groups, but in other cases a campaign can start with 'quick and dirty' research, such as a question on the Women's Health UK Instagram account that may garner thousands of responses to check that the team is on the right track.

Sanderson says they tried to do something different from previous campaigns: "There have been other campaigns out there that celebrate body diversity and that's all wonderful, but what we realised was that mindset was key, and what came through in research was that the inner critic was the biggest saboteur of body confidence."

Therefore the team focused on mindset in the content and events developed as part of the campaign, and even developed a course on developing body confidence in the form of a podcast, with two-to-three-minute episodes to listen to daily over the course of four weeks.

As Hearst UK's most successful campaign to date, Project Body Love has reached more than 20 million women to date and powered a 43 per cent uplift in the number of women agreeing they have higher body confidence as a result of their efforts.

Be rigorous about planning

In order to succeed with purpose-driven campaigns, Sanderson highlights timing and forward planning as two key ingredients, with firm deadlines.

As well as the usual challenges for any editorial campaign, such as developing multi-platform content that will work across print, digital and social media, this type of project has additional tasks. That includes preparing graphics and slogans to keep campaign content consistent, and building in time for additional input and sign-off from any external partners. Sometimes there will be campaign-specific tasks - distributing thousands of donated bras from a warehouse to nationwide charities, for example.

In several recent campaigns, Women's Health UK has launched it on digital and social media, following up with more in-depth content in print later on - a change from previous print-first mentalities.

"The heavy lifting is in the prep and getting all the content ready to go [...] We are a small team but we are very organised. I make sure everything is done so far in advance so that we are ready to go and everything just needs to be uploaded or sent to press."

Choose partners carefully

Joining forces with commercial partners brings in extra investment which means the campaign can be bigger and better, whether that is by incorporating events, podcasts, or reaching a new group of people.

One thing to bear in mind is that partners need to embody the same values, with creative control of the campaign remaining on the editorial side.

The team will sometimes come up with two sets of plans for a campaign, one looking at what would be possible without a partner, and one incorporating the extra elements that could be included with a suitable partner. One campaign, Reclaim Your Run, was purely editorial without any partners.

Women's Health UK campaign It Starts With A Bra centred around supporting women from disadvantaged backgrounds to get into exercise, and for this campaign sports equipment company Under Armour came on board and donated bras - therefore ensuring that the campaign had a tangible offline impact. Around two thirds of people reached by the campaign said they had committed to regular exercise as a result.

"These women needed that very real item to start their fitness journey, that was the whole ethos of the campaign. I don't think the campaign would have been anywhere near as successful without that element."

Keep the feedback loop going

Like many publications, Women's Health UK sees its readers as a community and they are closely involved in the campaigns. If readers feel they have contributed, for example through surveys or even by sharing a hashtag to support the campaign, this makes the community stronger, explains Sanderson.

"Readers are not afraid to call us out when they think we've done something wrong. That's the wonderful thing about social media; it's very instant, we get their opinions there, but also they love telling us what they think we're doing well or what we could be doing better."

Sanderson says that many campaigns involve constantly holding a mirror up to the audience, in other words explaining the results of surveys or focus groups, but then building on that and developing content to offer solutions to the issues surfaced through the research.

A final note is that these campaigns are not 'one and done'.

Project Body Love has been going for several years, and Sanderson says that this and It Starts With a Bra are examples of campaigns which will continue to evolve over time.

"We're taking them forward, because there's always room for improvement [...] the pandemic had a huge impact on women's body confidence because we're sat on Zoom all the time and confronted with our image more than we ever have before.

Women's body confidence took a battering because of that. Then we've got a cost of living crisis that's here, so there's definitely more work that It Starts With A Bra needs to do. Society evolves, life evolves, and we'll evolve with it."

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