As South Africa’s largest privately-owned insurance group, Hollard provides short-term insurance, life insurance as well as investment products to a very diverse customer base, including individual consumers, commercial entities and corporate clients across South Africa. Driven by the brand purpose of: “Enabling more people to create and secure a better future.” Hollard’s overarching brand communications objective was to continue to communicate what Hollard stands for, as a truly purpose-driven organization, and to differentiate the brand from a highly competitive category through the belief that “There’s always a better way.” Acting as a catalyst for positive and enduring change in the lives of all South Africans, beyond Hollard employees, partners and policyholders.

We were challenged to find a way to restore belief in a brand promise and create a campaign that tangibly worked towards creating better futures in South Africa. Our solution was in the form of an entirely new insurance product.

We created Hollard ChangeMaker - The first insurance product you can pay for – with volunteer time.

It was an innovative new payment solution designed to benefit customers, and society. To truly create a better future, we realised that we had to change the way Hollard actually did business. So, for the first time ever, the agency, Hollard actuaries and NGO’s worked together to create an initiative that invited everyone to create a better future. We turned our brand promise into an action that everyone could be part of.

Hollard’s audience is a broad spectrum of South Africans - from lower income households, through to corporates that need commercial policies. While seeing significant success in their brand building efforts to date, brand tracker results showed that people experienced a disconnect in their product category solutions, with an opportunity to improve policy holder retention.

We set out to entrench Hollard’s status as the most human insurer, by using our product solutions as a tangible proof point and bring proof to our brand promise -enable more people to secure better futures.

People want to help, but they don’t know where to start. So we gave them a starting point and an incentive to help co-create a better future.

As a nation of givers, 56% contribute to social and community development, and 53% said they would be more likely to donate more time and money if they had more themselves.

We completely re-engineered Hollard’s payment system, turning units of volunteer time into a currency to pay for insurance, successfully turning a grudge purchase into something that makes a real impact. Every hour volunteered reduced the customer’s monthly premium. All Hollard customers had to do was simply sign up, choose one of the volunteer causes we pre-selected with our NGO partner ForGood, log their volunteer time to their account, and they’d be discounted off their monthly premium.

This initiative was designed to pay your insurance premium while you build a better future. But more importantly - each small act had a massive ripple effect on society.

The launch campaign demonstrated how small acts made a big difference and invited everyone to start building better futures. Already making a difference to so many lives, ChangeMaker has restored belief in Hollard’s brand promise, and will continue to do going forward.

In its first week of launching, Hollard ChangeMaker achieved over 1.9 million impressions across all digital platforms, and the brand was voted number 2 on the Scopen Agency's Scopes Report of the marketing landscape in South Africa. The campaign is currently on-going but so far has a 100% positive campaign sentiment and is now set to create real change in South Africa as it progresses over the next 6 months.