The Irish public gave some extraordinary Christmas gifts last year. For example, 6,672 pigs were bought for families in Honduras, more than 1,500 families in Sudan and Kenya got a plough, and the same people who gave bottles of perfume to their mums gave 1,953 medical kits to villages in Vietnam. Not to mention the 400,000 chicks that were bought with Irish punts for Central America.
It was the season of goodwill and Tr≤caire, the Irish developmental agency, tapped into it with such creativity and commercial savvy that its "Global Gift" campaign picked up an award for direct marketing at an industry awards ceremony in April. Then, earlier this month, the same campaign picked up an award for excellence in public relations.
At the PR industry's own awards, the PRCA awards, Tr≤caire's campaign stood alongside other PR campaigns developed by international consultancies for banks, financial products, alcohol and confectionery.
"It's the first time we've entered the PR awards, and it underlines our professional approach to communications," says Caroline Lynch, communications officer for Tr≤caire.
The Global Gift campaign took on the commercialism of Christmas in the simplest, most focused way, and was supported by a radio advertising campaign that was, most unusually for a Third World charity, hilariously funny.
Would-be contributors were given a list of prices for different items, from £10 for a chick to £100 for a new roof, and were asked to donate accordingly. It was clear that each item would go to a family in one of the countries in which Tr≤caire operates in the developing world. In return, the donor got a smartly illustrated certificate which they could then give as a Christmas present. This was designed so that it was an acceptable-looking gift and would not look like a charity buy.
The effect of PR as a form of communications is notoriously difficult to measure, but the adjudicators at the direct mail awards - a more hard-nosed form of marketing - could see not just the numbers of chicks and pigs and so on, but also the hard figures.
The Global Gift campaign alone brought in £600,000 for Tr≤caire, whose usual "take" at Christmas hovers around the £200,000 mark. Of the organisation's £26.1 million budget for the year 2000, 66 per cent came directly from voluntary donations from the Irish public. "We're like any income-conscious organisation: in our communications strategy we're trying to be as innovative and leading-edge as we can," says Lynch.
Tr≤caire has recently taken on a press officer to add to its communications staff of two. This team devises and co-ordinates the PR side of its campaigns and also commissions PCC, an award-winning Dublin-based communications company which specialises in the non-profit sector, to do advertising campaigns in support of the message.
Breaking through the media noise is the goal of any PR campaign, but for charities that have limited money to spend on advertising, figuring out ways of using the media is a prime goal. At the same PR awards ceremony, Tr≤caire also picked up an award for their Lenten campaign to abolish slavery.
The annual Lenten campaign is Tr≤caire's single most important event, as it combines both its fundraising and campaigning remits. More than 1.1 million collection boxes were distributed this year, and while the boxes' contents have not yet been fully counted, early indications are that this year's donations will exceed last year's record £7.1 million.
"Our strategy was to get information about the existence of slavery out to as many people as possible," says Lynch. "And that meant using as many media outlets as possible."
This year, Tr≤caire tried something that it hadn't done before - press trips. It brought The Sunday Tribune and the INN radio news network out to India and helped Charlie Bird co-ordinate a series of reports for RT╔ news, as well as a documentary.
As part of the campaign, postcards were distributed along with the collection boxes. These could be sent to both the UN Commissioner for Human Rights (to press for the abolition of slavery) and the Irish Government (to encourage it to lobby at UN level for slavery's abolition). About 80,000 campaign postcards were subsequently signed and sent.
"That is a measure of the success of our communications strategy, and we also measure the success of the information campaign by, for example, the number of requests we had during the 12-week campaign from schools and other organisations to provide a speaker who could talk publicly on the subject," says Lynch.
The judges at the PR awards described the Lenten slavery campaign as a many-layered and complex campaign, "which, as a result of creative thinking, careful planning and outstanding execution, struck a sensitive and emotional chord in Irish society which has not yet gone away".
"Positive" and "engaging" were just two of the words used by members of the judging panel to describe the campaign, which they thought succeeded superbly in its dual task of fundraising and increasing awareness of poverty.
As Lynch points out: "Fundraising is a very competitive area because we are all competing for a slice of the same cake. We have to be professional in our approach because we are talking to a highly educated and discerning public who are knowledgeable about development issues."
Tr≤caire is currently issuing mail shots emphasising the success of the Global Gift campaign, partly because it plans to run the campaign again this coming Christmas and also because it knows that accountability, particularly for charitable organisations, is a live issue.
"It's one thing putting out a call for donations when there is a disaster somewhere in the developing world," says Lynch. "That deals with an immediate problem, but we also have to communicate on an ongoing basis with the public and to make sure the message gets through. We have to be as professional and innovative as anyone else."