Bark For Our Parks

Background

Fields in Trust is the only charity, incorporated by Royal Charter, that seeks to champion and protect parks and green spaces across the UK in perpetuity. Since 1925, they have campaigned for greater recognition of the role parks and green spaces play in all our lives whilst also seeking to legally protect them for local communities to enjoy forever. To date, they have secured the future of nearly 3,000 parks and green spaces representing 6% of all publicly accessible green space in the UK. But that means that 94% of parks and green spaces could still be lost.

The brief

Fields in Trust recognised the need to diversify their fundraising streams and create new and sustainable income channels. They specifically wanted to explore the creation of a new activity or event and were open to ideas on how this could work, whether that be virtual or in person. Their main priorities were to raise significant funds to continue the work of Fields in Trust as well as raising their profile and recognition of the charity.

The work

We were excited to work with Fields in Trust on this campaign and developed the concept that we had pitched: Bark For Our Parks. The idea was simple: a dog walking challenge asking dog owners to challenge themselves to walk 50km or 100km over the month of May to raise money and help protect parks and green spaces.
We started by doing a YouGov survey in order to evaluate the market as well as see if there was an appetite to take on such a challenge. From both quantitative and qualitative results, we were able to conclude that there was and that our proposition was appealing. From this we were also able to identify our target audience and we created a messaging hierarchy that would engage them.

A key component of this campaign was ensuring that the strategy behind it was well thought out and achievable for Fields in Trust to implement. We pulled together a media plan, acquisition plan and a stewardship plan which included content for the dedicated Facebook group. This was important to consider alongside our visual look and feel, as well as the campaign as a whole.

In terms of the creative, we had a distinct vision and knew that we wanted to implement an illustrative design that would be visually appealing. It was also important for the creative to be relatable to dog owners and the use of illustrations, rather than photography, meant we could be more representative of all dogs. Throughout our campaign we focus on our “hero dog” and also include other illustrated dogs as our supporting characters.

We created a number of assets for Bark For Our Parks, both virtual and physical, but one of our main undertakings were the elements for our paid media campaign. We created a bank of static Meta ads to be staggered throughout the duration of the campaign, as well as one light touch animation. We also produced longer form animation to be used as YouTube and Teads ads. Our animations are around 15 seconds long and manage to give some background on Fields in Trust, as well as explain our event and encourage people to sign up. We use our hero dog and supporting characters to help our narrative as well as dynamic animation to captivate our audience.