Sunny Days Campaign
for Plan International USA
Plan USA is a girls’ rights organization that has been offering a successful child sponsorship product for over fifty years.
The Need
After identifying opportunities for this organization’s child sponsors to send gifts directly to their sponsored children, we needed to design a product that would address another key issue identified in research related to the needs of this customer base. The ability for sponsors to write letters to their sponsored child is an important component on the child sponsor product, but many sponsors felt guilty about not writing, or not writing enough to their sponsored child, which proved to be a threat to the organization’s donor retention efforts.
The Solution
To address the need and assuage sponsor’s guilt related to letter writing, I was inspired by Highlights magazine to create a monthly magazine for which sponsors could buy an annual subscription and thereby achieve regular, automated communications with their sponsored child. For this organization, the sponsored child is as much a client as the sponsor, so the magazine was created to provide educational entertainment children or all ages, with a fun and highly illustrated them for each issue, tested with diverse focus groups, and created at low cost by the in-house creative team.
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Product branding and design guidelines
Magazine structure and design
Packaging and distribution operations
E-commerce
Direct mail appeal
Email campaign
Digital advertising campaign
Social media campaign
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The Sunny Days campaign was an immediate success with sponsors, increasing Spring fundraising revenue by 44% in it first year. This campaign is in its fourth year and continues to see improved revenue, as well as ROI. Additional metrics of success related to the 2023 Sunny Days campaign include:
2,500+ new subscriptions
Over 3,000 site visitors
$4.44 return on investment (ROI)
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“Jennifer's creativity gave birth to the child sponsors bounceback program. These are appeals targeting child sponsors for incremental gifts to Plan, such as Sunny Days magazine subscriptions, holiday Little Treasures campaigns and sponsored children's birthday cards. This suite of work has resulted in over $2.5M in unrestricted revenue since their inception and they continue on today as healthy sources of unrestricted revenue from our child sponsor base.”
Focus group footage:
