Social Enterprise Scotland (SES) is an independent, Scottish, membership-led organisation, built and controlled by social enterprises. SES unites and represents Scotland’s social enterprises as the national membership-led body.
To-date SES has mainly focused on B2B facing activity, engaging with the Scottish Government, third-sector and corporate partners on key initiatives that support and promote the 6,000+ social enterprises across Scotland. However, the impact of COVID-19 presented an unprecedented opportunity to extend the reach and impact of it's work beyond its current target audiences and drive awareness and consideration in the B2C market.
COVID-19 has seen a dramatic shift of focus towards local community and sustainability – with social purpose being highly valued by consumers. This shift in culture allowed SES to secure funding to deliver an ambitious initiative built around consumer facing activity. SES appointed Hampton to develop a new consumer facing brand, online directory, and campaign to promote social enterprises in Scotland.
Aligning with the global ‘buy social’ brand, the new brand for Buy Social Scotland was positioned to inspire – a brand that the people of Scotland will believe in. The colour palette had an authentic blend of Scottish colours, the tone of voice was human, collaborative, and empowering and a flexible strapline – ‘business that gives back’ – was introduced.
As there was no existing consumer-facing asset in Scotland to introduce the social enterprise model, we produced a brand animated video to assist with sharing the important messaging in a visually engaging, and digestible way. A script, storyboard, voiceover and final illustrated animation were all produced.
The new website’s main feature is the online directory of social enterprises and the products/experiences available. Users can search based on location, needs/interests, cause, and budget. Visitors to the website can also find out more about the social enterprise business model and its impact, and the Buy Social Scotland national campaign. Check out the website at www.buysocialscotland.com.
In addition to the full directory on the website, a digital Christmas gift guide was also produced to help inspire customers. This includes a selection of products broken down by price, theme, age, and gender.
The B2C campaign took a digital led approach and included a mix of paid, owned and earned activity with the main objectives to raise awareness of social enterprises in Scotland and drive website traffic to buysocialscotland.com.
Aligning with the new umbrella brand, a festive themed creative was introduced for the Christmas campaign. The strapline also evolved to ‘gifts that give back’ for the Christmas campaign.
Partnering with The Media Shop we ran a digital advertising campaign targeting Scotland. Working closely with the marketing and communications manager at SES we devised a social media plan (for the existing SES social media platforms; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube) and produced various assets to support the roll out of this. We identified that online influencers were going to be key to reaching our target audience and meeting the objective of raising awareness of social enterprises and driving traffic to the buysocialscotland.com website. Not only did the influencers enable the Buy Social Scotland campaign to reach their existing audiences, but they also acted as content creators – producing authentic content to be shared on the SES social media platforms.
In order to involve the social enterprises and to enable them to take part in the campaign and promote #BuySocialScotland, there was also a B2B element. A digital toolkit was produced for them to access that made a range of assets available to them for press and social activity. Not only did this help raise awareness of the campaign with the social enterprises and encourage them to take part but, by providing them with the toolkit, this also extended the reach of the campaign with their existing audiences.
The results
- 100+ social enterprises involved in Buy Social Scotland
- 1.5+ million people reached as a result of the campaign
- 74k+ YouTube and 2k+ Facebook/Instagram video views
- 970k users reached across social channels and 8k+ interactions
- 1k increase in followers across SES channels
- 11 influencers involved across Scotland
- 23k+ new users on the website
- 3.5k clicks on the “Purchase” buttons on the website
- Resulting in 38% of the initial batch of products featured on the website selling out
With a short timeline of two months to deliver a national campaign to launch Buy Social Scotland, it was great to be able to lean on Hampton's expertise and creative team to develop all the building blocks collaboratively with us in an agile way. From helping us nail our key messages to building an expressive and versatile brand language, and developing a custom directory website from the ground up, Hampton was a great partner to guide and support us every step of the way. We are delighted with the quality of the output, how well this first campaign has performed, and are excited to scale this initiative in the future.
Jesse Audubey, Marketing & Communications Manager, Social Enterprise Scotland
