The crucial role universities have to play in the fight against climate change is undeniable. By advancing knowledge, developing response and engaging in key research they are at the forefront of efforts to combat the global climate emergency. However, communicating findings and recommendations beyond the academic community remains a challenge for the sector. Kudos have taken on this challenge by producing a platform to showcase research from the world’s leading publishers and universities to ensure that knowledge is found, understood and applied by a broad audience. Offering simple explanations from experts in one central store, they needed a partner to raise awareness and engage climate curious audiences. The Brand Education became this partner, working with Kudos to deliver audience research, channel planning, copy writing and campaign delivery, with some impressive results.

The launch of the new platform was aligned with the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) which brought both opportunity and challenge. Whilst raising significant awareness and shining a spotlight on the threat the world is facing, it also led to a very crowded market with brands scrambling to highlight their endeavours to tackle the problem.

With a modest budget and a global audience spanning the UK and US, we needed to be astute to cut through the noise and raise awareness across the general public, policy makers and industry leaders. To do this we started at the beginning and revisited the audience’s needs. The Brand Education conducted search trend analysis and distilled our findings into three key themes on what the audience were looking for:

●  Clear direction– many knew the problem fairly well, but were less confident on the solution and were looking for clarity on actions they could take to make a difference
●  A qualified opinion– whilst the internet is cluttered with opinions on climate change, the audience were looking for advice from experts trained in their field
●  The confidence to speak up– many felt unqualified to join the conversation on climate change and wanted help to form their own opinion to discuss with their peers

The challenge was clear, the audience need and platform solution aligned perfectly but we needed a communication strategy to connect the two.

Our solution needed to align to audience interest, generate conversation, drive traffic to the website and enable us to gather rich data for future planning.Social Media was the perfect environment for this, enabling us to identify those with a clear interest, deliver the message in an engaging way and provide a direct link to the rich content on offer at Kudos. The strategy encompassed both LinkedIn and Facebook where we knew our audience were present.

We had established in our research that we needed to help the audience feel empowered, understand the actions they could take and have the confidence to join the conversation. We took this insight and developed five iterations of copy to showcase how the Kudos Climate Change Knowledge Cooperative delivered against each of these needs. The variations in copy enabled us to test and learn within the campaign and optimise towards the most effective message as the campaign progressed.

With objectives of reach, engagement and data harnessing we employed three different formats with our strategy:

● Single image ads – to deliver against our priority of reach, raise awareness of the new platform and align audience need and the platform solution
●  Carousels– to showcase key research projects and drive engagement
●  Story polls– to give our audience a chance to voice their opinion, feel included, connect to our mission, and provide valuable insight into what is important to them

The user journey was carefully considered, and a bespoke landing page was set up to showcase key research and enable the audience to search for content relating to their area of interest.

Our audience centric approach paid dividends with the campaign delivering against:

Our test and learn approach offered valuable insight into the audience, and the most successful copy ‘Take action with our experts behind you’ solidified the output of our audience research.

But don’t just take our word for it, hear from Kudos on their experience with The Brand Education:

“Climate Change was the first in a range of topics for which Kudos is leading collaboration across the sector, bringing together themed summaries of research and promoting them to broader audiences,” says Charlie Rapple, Chief Customer Officer at Kudos. “These showcases build on the unique strength of Kudos as driver of audience for research – both within academia, and in other important groups like the media, general public, policy makers and industry. The Brand Education were a knowledgeable, creative and trustworthy partner. We’ll be working with them again as we launch our next showcases, on topics such as infectious diseases, war & peace, and diversity & equality.”

If you are interested in running a paid media campaign and want to work with a partner that drives results, get in touch with us here at The Brand Education. Or, if you need in-house social support across your organisation, check out our workshops designed to give academics the confidence and skills to raise their profile and visibility of research.