Uniting a community for veterans

Together, we undertook a Plan to Grow project, benchmarking Help for Heroes’ warm and cold performance, looking at their fundraising products and the channels they were using to communicate about them. We also looked at their supporter behaviour, prospective audiences, and what was happening in the market.

This rich overview gave us some clear ideas about where growth could come. One of these was the creation of a membership product. 

We could see existing behaviours for being part of a charity membership in both their current and growth audiences. And lots of motivation around badging and aligning with Help for Heroes in particular.

So we set out on a collaborative creative journey, to develop a way of uniting Help for Heroes supporters with a membership offer that tapped into the sense of community and pride at the heart of the organisation. 

We were keen to make this feel like an exclusive but warm community – sharing the voices of both veterans and Help for Heroes team members. Welcome gifts included a pin badge, a fridge magnet and a card designed by a Help for Heroes support group for the loved ones of injured veterans. 

Launch creative included digital testing across a range of executions, to see whether the primary motivation was self-badging or cause. 

Early results have been extremely promising, with twice as many sign-ups as the original target.