By launching special edition cards for this year’s Valentine’s Day, Scope leveraged direct marketing to drive engagement with the campaign and issue.

We knew from previous campaign experience that tapping into relationships, love and sex as a theme for awkwardness was potent. Leveraging Valentine’s Day as a cultural event, we created beautifully designed alternative Valentine’s Day cards. The cards were chosen because they gave us a voice during a culturally potent moment and were designed to connect with each individual. They also helped us generate further support for the charity’s cause.

This was a piece of tactical activity using an existing campaign. The beauty of the cards were their simple execution and the fact that we could get them out quickly. The cards were gift-packed and distributed in Scope high street stores. This was supported by an online page which allowed people to send and share the cards across the web. There was also some in-store activity with cards presented in Scope shop windows.

The Valentine’s Day cards were a hit. Celebrities including RJ Mitte tweeted support for the cards online, and they were featured in the Telegraph, Sky News, the Metro and Huffington Post, to name a few. They cards sold out in the Scope shops within days.

To demonstrate how much of a direct marketing success they were, emails promoting the cards were sent to the 4.5k people that signed up to find out more about ETA. The email we sent out had a 18.2% open rate and a 2.8% click through rate (double the Scope average).

But it didn’t stop there with online also proving successful. Overall the 'End the Awkward' website content had 20,665 unique page views and accounted for 21% of all traffic to the Scope website in that week. The page featuring the cards had 8,787 unique page views becoming the most popular page, even surpassing the homepage.