EY Foundation Shows How Charities Can Make an Ad Impact

EY Foundation

Access their skills

3.3

The EY Foundation is an independent charity dedicated to helping young people from impoverished and disadvantaged backgrounds get a foothold in the workplace. Since its inception in 2014 it’s helped over 24,000 young people and created 23,000 volunteer roles.

But as a charity, the EY Foundation faces hardship of its own when it comes to advertising. Charity and NGO ads are not a high-performing sector on our Test Your Ad database, for one very good reason. Charities exist to raise awareness of and solve problems. But viewers in general do not want to think about problems, issues, or suffering when they encounter ads. It’s a frustrating truth that charities must find a way to handle if they’re to make effective commercials. And many of them rely on strongly negative, or even shocking emotions to drive short-term donations.

That can be an effective strategy, but it doesn’t help a charity brand in the long term. A better option – and it’s not one every charity can easily take, we admit – is to emphasise the positive, and demonstrate solutions, resilience and hope rather than try to tap into sorrow or anger. That’s what leads to positive emotional response and ultimately to longer-term success for any brand, charity sector or otherwise.

But most charities can’t or won’t do this, and so the average Test Your Ad score for the sector sits at a modest 1.7-Stars. We’ve picked the EY Foundation’s ad as an example of work which outperforms its sector, using a few creative strategies which are unusual for charities and pulling its score up to a 3.3-Star Rating, almost a full Star above average.

The most obvious of these is how lively and vivid the ad is. The ad uses the idea of free school meals as a springboard to show the entrepreneurial spirit of a generation who’ve “never been handed anything on a plate”, with the young protagonist caring for younger siblings, helping friends, and generally muiti-tasking his way through a dynamic, high stress environment. Exactly the kind of skills and personality a business can use, as the ad reveals at the end.

The ad makes great use of an engaging protagonist and integrates a driving indie rock soundtrack into the action of the commercial – another kid asks for the music to be turned down as she’s trying to study. The overall impression is of kids taking control of their own lives and turning chaos into opportunity – it’s upbeat and inspiring and shows, rather than tells, the viewer about what the EY Foundation does.

If there’s a criticism to be made of the ad it’s that by holding the reveal of the brand until the end it risks damaging Brand Fluency – charities and nonprofits need strong branding as much as any consumer facing product, and introducing the EY Foundation at the beginning might have helped this without taking away from the ad’s overall emotional impact. But it’s still a strong, successful and unusual example of a nonprofit ad in a sector which has serious barriers to overcome.

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