November is here, which means Movember is here as well. The annual event that encourages men to grow their moustaches during the month of November to raise awareness of men's health issues, has become popular in recent years.Each year, the charity communicates from a unique and innovative standpoint to encourage awareness of men’s health issues and donations to the charitable cause.

To drive donations during its primary fundraising month, the Melbourne-based 15 year-old charity, Movember foundation, has launched its new campaign for 2018, designed by purpose-driven digital agency Blue State Digital. The campaign will be used across the UK, the US, Canada and Australia.

Blue State Digital came up with a detailed digital acquisition campaign, which encourages men to get involved and raise awareness by either growing a moustache, running 60 kilometres over the month, hosting an event or donating. Additionally, exclusively in the US, an awareness campaign taking place in the New York area, will be released across all  social channels, YouTube and out of home media.

Meaghan Bilinski, digital marketing & automation director at the Movember Foundation says, “We were excited to work with Blue State Digital again in 2018 to build upon the success we saw last year. In a few short years, with BSD’s help, we have developed a sophisticated data driven digital advertising approach that focuses on intelligent use of data to ultimately drive fundraising revenue for our organisation.”

This is not the first time Blue State Digital works for this cause, with the 2018 campaign being the continuation of the work the agency did in 2017, when it conducted deep analysis of the most important segments of the Movember Foundation’s database, testing and finessing the foundation’s messaging, while examining its audiences, across the whole duration of last year’s campaign.

Hannah Johnson, managing director at Blue State Digital says, “Being able to dig into the data and generate insights, tests and refinements that make a real, monetary difference to the charity and those it supports has been a huge privilege and is already helping us drive efficiencies. We’re all firm supporters of Movember at Blue State Digital and want to help the foundation exceed its expectations again this year so it can continue to fund lifesaving research into men’s health and raise awareness amongst affected communities.”

The 2018 has been tasked to surpass last year’s impact, a difficult goal considering the 2017 campaign managed to increase Movember’s sign-up by 33% and its donation targets by 84%. To achieve that, the 2018 campaign will focus on specifically reaching the most engaged of the charity’s fans and contacts.

The campaign’s design is bold and focused on imagery, with graphics and illustrations that have the iconic moustache logo front and centre. The language that is used to encourage people to sign up, falls into three categories; direct asks, such as ‘Grow a Mo, save a bro’, countdown messaging to encourage sign up through the month, and testing new 'outlier' content.

Overall, Blue State Digital will utilise more than 4000 variations of ads across social and digital channels, in an effort to ensure the campaign reaches both its loyal following that signs up every year, and people new to the Movember cause.

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