Emergency Response for Ukraine (Save the Children UK)

Client: Save the Children UK

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine. This instigated a rapid emergency response by EssenceMediacom on behalf of Save the Children to ensure much needed aid to the people, and children, of Ukraine. This urgent crisis campaign quickly and effectively used intelligently informed SEO strategy and a total campaign cost of £2000, to successfully generate over £75,000 in donations in first week alone.

With extreme events unfolding at pace, search results fluctuated as increasing information became available from competing charities, government, news and popular culture sites. Our challenge was to convert public attention into tangible donations, at speed and minimal cost. To do this, we initiated a rapid SEO response to ensure Save the Children were ranking strongly to capitalise on the increased digital attention. We knew the success of our efforts relied on our speed and reactiveness from analysis of previous emergencies. Briefed via a planned emergency WhatsApp group, optimisations were produced and delivered within 1 hour, and implemented within same day - resulting in the first donation being received within 24hours. As there was no historical keyword volume, we utilised historical data from previous emergency campaigns and cross-referenced this with social media and news trends to anticipate which queries would be popular with searchers. This response delivered Save the Children’s best performing campaign - 22,464 visits driving 3,485 donations worth over £234k by the end of March - achieving an incredible ROI of 11,720%.