Harnessing the power of word of mouth and door drop to drive donotions
Background
Red Nose Day 2025 took place on 21 March, marking 40 years of Comic Relief. The appeal has always been a crucial fundraising moment, delivering a vital uplift in income to support deprived communities worldwide. Across the UK millions donned their iconic Red Noses and tuned into the TV spectacular, sparking donations nationwide.
Looking to push their fundraising further in 2025, Comic Relief set out to broaden their media mix by revisiting a channel they hadn’t used in over five years - and one that they hadn’t got to work historically - door drop.
The ambition was twofold: to raise brand awareness that would prompt donations via the TV show or online, while also driving direct response and donations.
Solution
Working with Join the Dots, Comic Relief launched a highly targeted and creatively distinctive door drop campaign.
The mailing featured the story of Millicent, a woman diagnosed with HIV during the height of the South African epidemic who went on to become a mentor mother. Her work delivering door-to-door health services illustrated the life-changing impact of Comic Relief’s funding. The piece also highlighted the charity’s 40-year history with a timeline of images dating back to 1985, showing supporters wearing red noses for the first time.
The format - a C5 outer, 2pp letter, 2pp donation form, DL lift piece and BRE - was chosen for its proven success with similar audiences. The creative was optimised using visual attention software to refine colour contrasts and layout positioning, maximising response potential. The ask was clear, with direct examples of how of what each donation amount could achieve.
Targeting was informed using a door drop model built out of Comic Relief’s existing donor data from the past two years, overlaid with Mosaic and TGI, to model and rank postal sectors across the UK - selecting those with the highest indexes.
To enhance targeting further and uplift response, Join the Dots introduced an additional layer of behavioural science through Herdify. Herdify helps charities acquire and convert new donors by harnessing the power of word-of-mouth. Humans are innately herd animals: 95% of us trust recommendations from friends and family over advertising. Yet around two-thirds of these conversations happen offline and are usually invisible to marketers. Herdify’s modelling makes these offline networks visible, detecting areas of strong word-of-mouth influence.
By overlaying Herdify scores onto the highest-indexing postcodes from the donor model, and removing those without a score, the campaign skewed towards communities where recommendations and influence were most likely to drive action. This enabled Comic Relief to discover audiences who might be willing to donate but had not yet done so, reducing wastage and significantly improving ROI.
Carbon offsetting, vegetable inks and the minimisation of wastage through advanced targeting ensured the campaign aligned with Comic Relief’s sustainability commitments.
The door drop landed a few weeks before Red Nose Day, reinforcing the upcoming TV broadcast and driving donations.
Results
Comic Relief’s highly targeted door drop was an outstanding success.
A huge £819,739 was raised from 24,991 donors (including matchback to other channel activity influenced by the door drop), delivering an ROI of 3.90 vs a target of 1.01 - nearly four times the forecast - at a cost per donor of £8 vs a forecast of £40.
59% of respondents were completely new to Comic Relief - a major win, given that existing donors could not be excluded from door drop activity. The gift aid opt-in rate was also exceptionally high at 83% vs. the industry standard of around 50%.
The Herdify overlay proved highly effective, with high-scoring areas generating stronger response rates, validating the targeting strategy and offering valuable learnings for future campaigns.
Source: SMP Award Winner 2025