The Challenge
The RSPCA’s community & events programme was successful but largely driven by third party events. They had piloted a new owned mass pax event, which did well with a small amount of investment. But they knew that the idea hadn't been developed using audience insight so they paused further investment and reached out.
We worked together to review the potential of their mass pax product, and develop & test 2 - 3 new mass pax ideas, working towards a pilot within 6 months. The idea taken to pilot needed to raise £100K in year 1, recruit 2,500 new supporters, ensure accessibility of participation, and align with the new brand that was to be launched in April 2024.
The Solution
We followed a three-step process to:
Get up to speed on the RSPCA’s new brand, fundraising strategy, and audience segmentation, as well as the trends shaping the mass pax market
Create a longlist of ideas and whittle it down to the most promising ones, with a focus on leveraging the unique opportunity presented by the upcoming launch of the new brand
Bring our 3 best ideas to life with live Facebook ads, landing pages, and sign-up forms to test appeal with the RSPCA’s target audiences
The Impact
Each of the three final ideas embodied a distinct approach to evolving the original proposition and performed well through audience testing.
A wide range of stakeholders from the RSPCA were engaged through the process, which facilitated excitement and learning for their team around innovation (process, tools, skills), and around the use of generative AI in NPD.
The 2 best performing ideas proceeded into a second round of audience testing, with one of them being piloted this summer, and the other planned for pilot next year.
Using AI on the project freed up the GI & RSPCA team’s time to think more deeply about the bigger, more strategic questions (like how to ensure a good fit with the new brand, and how to build sustainability into the proposition), which ultimately allowed us to deliver better quality work faster.
Key Insights
Our best performing idea returned the strongest smokescreen testing results we have ever seen at GI. A very first version of the idea was generated by ChatGPT at the beginning of the project, before we began ideation with humans.
Beginning the insight collection phase with rough AI-generated ‘provotypes’ (provocative prototypes) can be a more effective (yet equally fast) way of understanding what a target audience wants from a proposition, and how their needs & wants translate to interactions and behaviour in the real world.
Using generative AI as a sparring partner throughout the project allowed our project team (GI + RSPCA) to get to provocative prototypes quickly, and spend more time focusing on more strategic questions, like the role of the new products we were developing in their wider portfolio of events, and how it could align itself to their new brand.