SHARE teamed up with WaterAid to define a new social strategy focused on driving brand understanding, relevancy and word of mouth amongst audiences.
Understanding the problem
WaterAid came to SHARE with a problem. They had multiple uses for social media across teams but no overall direction, making it unclear what social was really for. They needed a social strategy and structure in place that unified all team needs, all while focusing on the core challenge – how do we drive understanding through engagement and education, and grow the community through relevancy and word of mouth?
The full picture
To identify key learnings, we carried out market, brand and competitor analysis, social audits and internal team interviews to get a well-rounded view of the brand. Our insights told us that WaterAid had a lot of ground to make up versus their competitors on social, but that their posts with themes of empowerment, reactivity and activism were driving success. This sparked a fire in our stomachs; we knew a charity with incredible brand purpose needed a powerful social purpose to match. Just being an active social feed was no longer an option; we needed to add value, connect with our community and stand out. This led us to our social proposition: Enable Change.
Share to care
We positioned ourselves as a facilitator of change and community empowerment, using the power of social sharing to do it. We needed to be activist, not just exist. The content shifted to be resourceful, reactive, relevant, visually iconic and most importantly, worth sharing – in fact, our aim was to have impact at mass scale, and become the most shared charity on social. In line with this new strategy, we produced a comms and best practice playbook, hosting workshops that enabled the WaterAid team to execute the strategy effectively.
To bring the new strategy to life, the design team expanded the social colour palette into the secondary colours. This allowed different types of content to be created whilst breaking up any repetition. They went on to produce a full suite of static and animated social media templates to visually unify all content. The design itself was iconic, bright and enabled discovery through simple yet clear directives. The templates were also built with flexibility in mind to allow all internal teams and partners to use them easily, while staying true to WaterAid’s new social purpose.
