Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
LIANNE HOWARD-DACE: So that's iHobo.
I'm Leann.
And this is Tim.
TIM HARFORD: Hi.
It's really great to be here.
We've been in some great company.
We feel very privileged as a small charity that--
We did a lot of show of hands earlier on, but could you just
put your hand up if you ever heard of Depaul UK before.
Yeah, that's fairly typical.
A small charity with almost zero brand awareness.
And here we are catapulted to a stage alongside
Smirnoff and Links.
It's really quite amazing to be here.
DePaul UK, is--
as we were introduced, thank you very much--
the largest youth homelessness charity in the country.
We've been around since 1989.
We started when benefit cuts at that time meant that more
and more young people were turning up on the streets of
London and finding themselves having to sleep rough.
But they were accessing adult services, day centers and
hostels, that sort of thing.
And there was great concern that in doing so, they were
learning how to live a homeless life from people
who'd been doing it for years, rather than learning how to
escape homelessness.
And DePaul UK came into being in order to help young people
escape homelessness.
And we've been doing it since 1989.
We still do it today.
We've grown to become the largest youth homelessness
charity in this country.
But we've also spawned Depaul Ireland, Depaul USA, Depaul
Slovakia, Depaul Ukraine.
So from very humble beginnings, we've done
something tremendous.
So I'm sad that so few people have heard of us.
But it's because we don't have a PR budget at all.
So we have to rely very heavily on friends to help us
do these things.
LIANNE HOWARD-DACE: We're really lucky that we've had an
existing relationship with Publicis London
for a number of years.
And they've always tried to help us with pro bono,
particularly design work.
So typically around this time of year, we'd have a
conversation with them, thinking about a
campaign over Christmas.
Because that's a time when people often are particularly
aware of homelessness and thinking about
people sleeping rough.
So they've done some really interesting print
campaigns for us.
But they've never really had the impacts that we would hope
for and really help us raise our brand awareness.
Like so many other charities, we've got a really typical
donor base.
They're 65 plus, aging donors.
And you know, it's a big question in the voluntary
sector at the moment.
How do we engage with younger people?
How do we get them supporting our causes?
As Tim has already mentioned, we've got the added issue of
low brand awareness across all different sorts of aid groups.
It's a hard cause to sell.
It's not sexy.
It's not fluffy and cute.
It hasn't really got the awe factor.
So we're kind of up against it a little bit.
TIM HARFORD: So, instead of having the usual conversation
with Publicis, our sponsor with iHobo, a couple of years
ago about what do we do for this year's Christmas
campaign, normally which would have ended up in a print
advert going into the Press, the Guardian, the Spectator,
that sort of thing.
What else could we do that would make our pound go a
great deal further?
I was just amazed looking at some of the production that
goes on at Smirnoff and Links.
I wonder what your production budget is.
It's just phenomenal.
We had about 6,000 pounds to spend on advertising.
That's it.
Because we don't have an advertising department.
None of that stuff exists for us.
If I could talk to you afterwards about sharing some
of that, that would be absolutely brilliant.
So Publicis thought, well, what can we do to make that
pound go so much further?
And the conversation started around doing something that
was going to be disruptive and interruptive, and just grab
people's attention in a way that a press advert was never
going to do.
And as that conversation started, somebody said, well,
I was in Soho at the pub last night.
And as I was walking home from the pub, I noticed so many
people had their phone to their ear.
And they were walking along absolutely oblivious to people
who were lying down in shop doorways trying to bed down
for the night.
They were invisible to them.
And yet their phone absolutely had their attention.
And that kind of sparked our thinking, how is it that a
phone interrupts your life and you allow it to do so so
willingly and so readily when you so easily can ignore a
cause like somebody being homeless in
the street so easily?
What is it about the phone that enables you to be
interrupted constantly by it?
And they do, don't they?
The moment it buzzes or bleeps or whatever your phone does,
you go for it.
You reach for it.
So how could we bring that spark of information to life?
How could we take the realization that a phone was
something that really, really invaded people's lives and
make something of it?
LIANNE HOWARD-DACE: And it was really a massive risk for us
as an organization.
And as you have seen, we chose quite a controversial name.
So there were a lot of things behind it that were quite
risky for us.
You know, we've got a reputation to manage.
And being in the charity sector, there's kind of a real
trust in your cause.
And things like that are really core values that you
can't really risk too much.
So it took a while to get some of that through our trustees
and to really develop the idea so that it could happen and
take place.
TIM HARFORD: You can well imagine that there was huge
hesitancy within our organization about this.
Massive discussion at senior management level.
Massive discussion among the trustees.
Are we not doing something here that's going to harm our
cause rather than benefit our cause?
And if we start producing something that talks about
young people as hobos isn't that insulting to them?
We did, in fact, consult young people that we work with and
none of them were insulted by the phrase at all.
They were very happy for us to be using it to do that.
We decided we would be telling a story.
And it's interesting that we've been hearing that
storytelling here today.
But not just tell a story, but have a story that people would
be able to change the outcome of.
And that's what iHobo is all about.
And you can just ignore him.
If you do, his life will spiral out of control.
He will end up overdosing, and that's
really the end of iHobo.
If you look after him well, he can begin to thrive.
He can begin to take steps away from that world.
But it's entirely in the hands of the user.
You have entire control over the outcomes of his life.
And it had to be controversial,
hence the name iHobo.
It had to be something that did jar with people the moment
they saw the name.
It wasn't going to be any good to be calling this the Depaul
UK homeless person app.
It just wasn't going to go anywhere.
So although there was a good deal of hesitancy about
calling it iHobo, there was a realization that we had to do
something as striking as that if we were
going to make it work.
LIANNE HOWARD-DACE: So we had all these
really interesting ideas.
And then, obviously, we had to implement them.
And I think one of the things that has been really key to
iHobo's success is that it implemented so many really
cutting edge technologies which a lot of other people,
certainly in the voluntary sector, not using because
they're a little bit new, they're a little bit untested.
So it's the first app to use live action.
So we really felt that a cartoon character just
wouldn't grab people, engage people in the same way.
And also, really utilizing the push notification technology
on the iPhone, which was quite new at the time.
And developing, I think, something like 30 push
notifications over the course of the three days when you're
looking after iHobo.
So it really is interrupting and disrupting people's
day-to-day life and really making them think about it.
Also, Apple have all these restrictions around in-app
purchases, and they don't allow charity
donations to happen.
And we managed to cleverly get around that by building an
integrated text to donate into the app.
So if you think that the app as it is now is controversial,
this is actually a toned down version.
Some of the elements to the story which we originally--
when the app was first submitted to Apple, had to be
taken out because it was just pushing it a
little bit too far.
So we did reign it in a little bit there.
And it was actually a really long process.
So from conception of the idea, it actually took 18
months until the app was alive in the app store just because
of all those different things that we had to get through.
And then it was really, how are we going to make
an impact with this?
So the app was seeded with a lot of tech bloggers.
Really just to try and start to get the word out.
And some of the very first comments were
a little bit scathing.
We've got some slides here of some different comments.
But then some really influential publications
picked up on it and applauded it, which is great because
that just turned the tide.
And everybody was to starting to see the good, the
innovation, and all the really positive aspects of the app.
And it got us an awful lot of interest.
So even Stephen Fry--
I don't know anyone on Twitter who doesn't
follow Stephen Fry.
And he was tweeting about it.
Which for us, with such a small press
budget, it's amazing.
And then everyone was just talking about it on Twitter
and on other social media platforms. So there was a real
buzz that started around the app.
TIM HARFORD: And impactful.
It was a massive success.
We, Depaul UK, spent 6,000 pounds doing this.
And it has just been phenomenal.
Within five days, it was the number one
download app in the iStore.
Not just free apps, paid-for apps as well,
it was number one.
It was tweeted about over 3,000 times in its first week.
It has had over 600,000 downloads since
it's been out there.
And that's just the UK.
It's not available anywhere else.
That's just the UK.
If we were to go with that dubious science of advertising
equivalent value, which I'm told is very hard to
calculate, but we estimate it's worth about 2.4 million
pounds of media that it has driven.
From Los Angeles, major broadsheets in this country,
being talked about by influential people, just
absolutely massive.
So we're just thrilled to bits, obviously, with the
impact that iHobo has had for us.
It's quite interesting to compare us with other brands
that might have a slightly greater recognition among you.
But this is the ratings list. So you'll see that iHobo has
been rated over 68,000 times.
Not very far short of Google's app, actually.
So that's absolutely astonishing that we should be
in such company.
Sorry.
We've also increased our donor base.
We've gathered some 5,000 new donors through this.
We didn't intend it to be a donor
gathering exercise at all.
It was supposed to be an exercise to get the name of
Depaul out there into the world more than it is.
So it has raised about 10,000 pounds.
So it has more than covered our investment in it.
But that wasn't the main reason for doing it.
The small gifts, the gift people were asked to make, was
1 pound, 3 pounds, or 10 pounds.
And there's a range across those three.
The average gift we received was about 2 pounds from it.
We've harvested something over 5,000 emails to our database,
which is brilliant.
And we communicate with those people.
If they've been really successful in looking after
iHobo, they get a special communication.
And if they've been less successful, we talk to them in
a slightly different way.
So we're trying just to keep in touch with people about it.
And of course, award-wise.
As we were introduced, we told that it has
won multiple awards.
It has been entered for 30 or so different awards, marketing
awards and others.
It has won three Guardian awards.
It has won the One Show award.
It won the EACA Care reward, the Grand Prix for that.
It's a European-wide Care award.
So absolutely phenomenal.
And of course, that's why we're stood on the stage here,
stood alongside such auspicious company here today.
So just too many to list. So impact wise, absolutely
astonishing.
LIANNE HOWARD-DACE: And in April this year, we did some
updates to the app.
So there were a few reasons for that.
We realized we were missing a massive trick of not catching
enough data.
So we added a kind of extra element to the game.
Personalized it so now the app actually talks to you by name.
And because it was just under a year later that we were
launching that update, we wanted to keep it as fresh and
cutting edge as possible.
So we integrated Facebook Connect with it to add with
the social sharing there.
And also, just raising more awareness of the cause.
So as you go through the game now, you collect these little
bits of rubbish and discarded things that you might find on
the street.
And each one of those tells you a fact about street
homelessness and homelessness in young people.
So lots of new things there just to make it even more
engaging to reach more people, and to also give us those
email addresses which are invaluable to us.
So, all-in-all, as Tim said, the app has been an absolute
huge success for us.
I don't think anyone anticipated it.
We all had our emergency comes plans in case it all went
horribly wrong.
And now we're still sort of in a position of, OK, now how do
we build this?
Where do we go with this?
So it's been a phenomenal success for us.
Also, just sort of in this context of this conference, I
think it's really a great example--
or we certainly feel it's a great example--
of an agency and a nonprofit working together and the
pro-bono relationship.
And really, good CSR is beneficial for both--
TIM HARFORD: Absolutely.
LIANNE HOWARD-DACE: --organizations.
You know, Publicis have got a great deal out of this, as
well as us.
So it has been really beneficial.
So if anyone else has got any fab ideas they want to chat to
us about later, we're more than welcome to hear them.
TIM HARFORD: Thank you so much.