Project Overview
This year, Australia's aid budget was cut to its lowest ever level. The Campaign for Australian Aid needed to raise awareness about the massive cuts to a brand new younger audience who don't traditionally engage with charities - so we created The Fairness Test, an interactive, animated mobile site that found out what Australians think is "fair."
From Taylor Swift disappearing from Spotify, to Prince Philip's knighthood, to cuts to overseas aid programs, we discovered how the country of the Fair Go feels on a range of controversial topics. By swiping left or right to vote on each issue, each user's choices led to the discovery of their own 'Fairness Personality', a personality profile represented by a cute illustrated character they could share with their friends on social media to promote the campaign. After learning about "Fairness" through the quiz, users were asked to email Joe Hockey and their local MP to campaign against the unfair cuts to Australian Aid.
Through the Fairness Test, we got tens of thousands of people involved in the Campaign For Australian Aid, emailing their politicians and spreading the word about fairness to their friends.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Murray Bunton, Executive Director
Scott Sanders, Managing Director
Tim Middlemiss, Communications Director
Sally Woellner, Senior Designer
Tom Maitland, Head of Digital
Steph Henderson, Communications Specialist
Jenni Ta, Designer & Illustrator
Project Brief
The topic of cuts to Australia's overseas aid budget isn't sexy - so we needed to break through fatigue around charity and political advertising, at the same time as reaching a young, disengaged audience to make noise about the Campaign for Australian Aid.
Australian aid makes an incredible difference in the lives of people across our region, and across the world, directly impacting millions of lives each year. Australian aid is the way that each of us have played our part in halving extreme poverty in the last 20 years. We reckon that's something worth celebrating.
With the biggest ever cuts to aid slated for the 2015 Federal budget, the Campaign for Australian Aid needed a fresh way to capture people's attention, and motivate them to email their local and federal members of Parliament to ask them to avoid any further cuts to Australian aid.
We knew who our audience was, we knew we had to reach them online, on mobile - but we needed to find a unique way to connect with them and call them to act.
Project Innovation/Need
With that brief in mind, we had one month to develop a unique pathway for new audiences to act against the cuts to aid. We built the Fairness Test and Interrupt Joe, both interactive, mobile friendly tools to engage new audiences and existing supporters about the impact of cuts to aid.
In a quirky, animated style The Fairness Test presented pithy ‘Fair or Not Fair?’ scenarios, placing decisions about the fairness of Prince Philip’s knighthood, Taylor Swift’s absence from Spotify and cuts to life-saving aid funding in the user’s hands. We chose not to tell our audience what to think, but instead asked them their thoughts on some of Australia's most current and controversial topics.
Once they completed the test, they were given a personalised character to share on social media and spread the campaign.
After sharing the test we asked these new supporters to Interrupt Joe, sending a persuasive email to Treasurer Joe Hockey, and their federal MP. Joe received more than 20,000 interruptions calling on him to act fairly towards the world’s poorest communities.
Design Challenge
The big challenge of the Fairness Test was to create something engaging and compelling, which would catch the attention of an audience that is excellent at filtering out boring or irrelevant content.
To add to that, we needed to solve this challenge in just a month to take advantage of the upcoming Federal Budget announcements. If we missed that date, the campaign would be useless.
With a solution in mind, we challenged ourselves to create something new for the charity sector, and to push that industry to try an approach with a cheeky and uniquely Australian sense of humour. Not only that, but we knew that the solution would need to live on mobile first and foremost.
There was an additional challenge in educating people on the subject of cuts to Australian Aid, a complex and definitely uninviting topic. We knew that our audience would be more motivated to act if they understood the issue more thoroughly. We knew that knowledge would be a necessity if we were going to convince them to take the extra step of emailing Joe Hockey or their local MP.
User Experience
At the end of the campaign more than 34,000 people started the quiz. Of that group, 85% (29,000) completed all 12 questions of the quiz and half of those went on to join the campaign for Australian Aid.
Not only that, but 20,0000 people went on to email Joe Hockey through the Interrupt Joe tool - calling for a fairer aid budget.
We then complemented this user experience by building a final feature that launched at the very moment that the Treasurer's Budget speech finished. As he concluded his speech, we took over the Fairness Test and Interrupt Joe to ask one further question - 'Is the Budget fair?'
Overnight, more than 12,000 people voted with 70% of those declaring that the cuts to Australian aid were 'unfair.' The final action of the site called on our newly sourced audience to share the impact of the recently announced cuts to aid on Twitter. The jumped at the opportunity, with #AustralianAid trending nationally throughout budget night, the first time that hashtag had trended across Australia.
Digital Experience - Mobile
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactive content for mobile. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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