How to create a successful marketing campaign: Toilet Twinning and World Toilet Day

The latest in our irregular series looking at successful marketing campaigns and how you can create your own winning promotion.

The charity Toilet Twinning was established in 2010 as a joint venture of NGOs Tearfund and Cord. Since then 175,337 Toilet Twins have been created and 1,052,022 lives have been transformed through safe sanitation. It raises money for sanitation projects through ‘toilet twinning’. For £60 you can twin your loo with a family’s household latrine in a vulnerable community in a country of your choosing. You then get a certificate to hang in ‘smallest room’, along with with a photo and GPS coordinates so you can look up your twin’s location on Google Maps. Lovely! You can imagine, it’s a quirky gift idea for that hard to but for uncle at Christmas but probably quite a hard sell to get people interested the rest of the year. This is why we love Toilet Twinning’s World Toilet Day campaign. Yes, World Toilet Day is a thing! So, what’s so good about this campaign and how can you recreate its success?

1. Great hook

Making use of an awareness day, anniversary or other time of public interest can save you a lot of hard work. There will already be other people, brands, organisations who will be sharing content on this topic and using the hashtag so you can piggy back on that too. The most important thing is that the hook you choose is really relevant to your organisation. World Toilet Day and Toilet Twinning were made for each other. Find your perfect fit and then run with it.

2. Make it Pun-ny

Talking of runs with it (see what we did there?!), Toilet Twinning is not afraid of a good pun. And we are here for it! We love a pun at We Are Comma. Toilet Twining use puns to great effect for topics which can be quite taboo still. They use the #bigpush to encourage their fundraisers to get those donations. And their headline fundraising initiative for World Toilet Day this year is the Big Squat – encouraging people “Squat 60 times a day from 1st of November to World Toilet Day on 19th of November and raise money for life-changing toilets!”. If that sounds to active for you, how about a piece of cake with their ‘soggy bottom bake sale’?

3. A clear target

This campaign is very clear in what your fundraising target should be. £60 – the cost of twinning a toilet. 60 squats for £60. It all adds up nicely. And it’s achievable. Getting friends and family to club together and help you raise £60 seems do-able. And the more people who think they can achieve it, the more people who will join in.

So how can you apply these lessons to your organisation, ahead of your next campaign to make it more successful?

Pic courtesy of Adobe Stock.