Exceeded average monthly donations and built brand awareness when Ouseburn Farm was forced to close in 2020

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Brief:

  • Maintain donations

  • Build awareness and educate the public about Ouseburn Farm's charitable mission

  • Grow brand awareness on social media

Ouseburn Farm

  • Gained 1,000 Instagram followers in 3 months using only organic reach

  • Received more than average the number of monthly donations in comparison to earlier in the year

  • Overachieved target in followers and engagement across all social media platforms

The Challenge

Ouseburn Farm is an urban farm based in the heart of Newcastle that works with the local community to educate vulnerable adults to help enhance their employment potential. They are home to a wide variety of animals and are a key part of the local community.

Ouseburn Farm often neglected its digital marketing, instead relying on word-of-mouth and offline marketing to spread its brand message.

But, in 2020, when Ouseburn Farm was forced to temporarily close, they turned to social media as their primary marketing tool to keep their audience engaged, build brand awareness during a volatile time, and continue to drive donations.

The Solution

Defined their target audience:

 

2020 was a confusing time for brands - audience needs and perspectives completely shifted, and it was vital for brands to know what these changes were to stay relevant in this new era.

 

From field research, surveys and analysis of their previous campaign results, I outlined three new audience types for Ouseburn Farm that we based our campaign around. From this research, we could spot where Ouseburn Farm could place itself in the new era that was driven to support local businesses and charities, and define a strategy on how to ask for donations from a struggling economy.

Creative content:

 

We drove to create content that would entertain our audience during a time when they were locked away in their homes, missing the outside space that Ouseburn Farm provides Newcastle City.

 

By creating fun, creative content we built a supportive community that saw the highest increase in engagement this their social media pages began.

 

Built an effective social media strategy that their volunteers could follow:

 

After defining their social media strategy and managing their socials for several months, I laid out a performance report to help Ouseburn Farm see the effect of investing time into their organic socials. With the performance report, I simplified the next steps into SMART measurables to train Ouseburn Farm’s volunteers to become social media gurus and provide an opportunity for their volunteers to gain social media marketing experience. 

  • "Jessie has been a friend of the farm for many years. She always goes the extra mile and brings fresh ideas to every project. She is professional, hardworking and most importantly, she cares and is trustworthy. This is so important when working with smaller charities especially, who may lack the insight or skills in-house to know whether a job has been done well."

    Ouseburn Farm