The SBI Youth For India FellowshipCharity Marketing & Advertising
About the brand
The Youth for India Fellowship is the flagship CSR program of The State Bank of India, run by the SBI Foundation. The fellowship aims to find and groom India’s next generation of social leaders who spend one year to go work in remote parts of India in developing specific areas of rural development. The fellowship also partners with leading global NGOs like Gram Vikas, Sewa Mandir, Barefoot College, Aga Khan Rural Support Program (India), Sewa Bharat, Dhan Foundation to name a few. The goal was to leverage the best charity marketing and advertising strategies to attract the best applicants to the fellowship.
The nudg team today manages the communications and promotions to attract an ideal mix of applicants to the fellowship. From social media communications, digital ads, landing page and emailer campaigns, the nudg team works closely with the fellowship team to ensure the most successful campaign outcomes and ROI in the history of the fellowship.
Our Solutions
Our SolutionsPPC & Performance Marketing
We reached, educated, and attracted ideal applicants worldwide using targeted search, social & mobile ads.
Social Media Marketing
We activated platforms to reach new audiences which was key to the brand exceeding its campaign goals.
Email Marketing
To further enhance one-to-one communications, we used nudg's email design & campaign platfrom.
A new graphic design route to give the brand a powerful new look
Sign language helps users break traditional language barriers — so we took inspiration from it to give the SBI YFI Fellowship its own unique brand design. Our grahic design team created symbols to expain the process fellows go through during the fellowship.
Further to this, the color palette was drawn from high-contrast vision-accessibility guidelines blended with elemental aspects to enhance the sustainability angle of the fellowship.
Here's how social media marketing helped reach millions in just weeks
When nudg started working with the SBI Foundation, it had already built a presence on most key social media platforms. Yet, it was adding new platforms like Instagram, optimizing YouTube, and enhancing the content and messaging on Facebook and Twitter which led to the exponential growth in the audience and reach. Using a memorable new ‘polaroid’ look, and using raw content that painted a realistic picture of the passion of each fellow who was working in the remotest parts of India, we built authenticity and trust around the fellowship. Giving one of India’s premier youth leadership initiatives the best charity marketing strategies it needed to grow.
Our team also used various social media innovations including Live Videos, Chatbots, Interactive Stories, Takeovers and more to feed the audience a constant supply of fresh and engaging content. The nudg campaigns led to the fellowship seeing a huge spike in applicants who first discovered the fellowship over social media.
Engaging users with real-time video production for
Facebook Live & YouTube Live stream sessions
Apart from solving a key objective for growing brand awareness and understanding for the fellowship, it was also key to use Live video formats to actively reach more audiences. It is a well known fact that Facebook Live & YouTube Live streams typically reach a greater audience than usual videos and posts. To help the brand reach more by spending less, the nudg team helped bridge alumni, NGO leaders, and SBI leadership with millions of users across the world.
The nudg team used out in-house studio team for key events, and after the 2020 lockdown our team redoubled producing live videos using our remote video production studio with digital promotions across chatbot notifications and emailers to remind, alert and ensure thousands of users tuned into the live videos.
Each live video engaged and answered thousands of the brand’s key target groups.
Live Videos
How landing pages amplified results
from various search & social PPC campaigns
Since there were various digital campaigns running with the objective of reaching the ideal mix of applicants, nudg needed to create a landing page. Which was also high-performance, intelligent and able to provide key real-time insights to the media and planning team. For this, our UI design & technology team devised best-practices in charity marketing and developed a custom landing page on nudg’s managed cloud hosting platform. Which helped track attributions & analytics, while also A/B testing various communications strategies on the landing page.
Going beyond Google Analytics to glean
powerful charity marketing insights
Getting the users to the application form was only half the challenge, the other half was to guide and retain them through the initial phases of the process. When nudg began the project, over 400 emails were being answered each day by the fellowship relations team. To optimize this and to improve performance, nudg implemented FreshDesk support knowledgebase. While also creating automated rules to instantly answer frequent questions.
At the same time tracking and improving the UI and UX of the application process so the outcomes of the campaign were being met. Using tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar heatmapping, and propreitary user experience mechanisms allowed in over a 400% improvement in campaign outcomes. Even application completions far exceeded the brand’s expectations. Especially during the 2020 pandemic when concerns were at an all-time high.
Ads across search and social media to
connect with the right audience
To project authenticity and build strong brand associations, the nudg media buying team used a careful mix of Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Ads. With strategic ad buys across specific websites and apps. Each ad was optimized and tracked closely using calibrated ad attribution and ROI tools. At the same time our team also analyzed insights from hundreds of charity marketing campaigns to ensure the ideal campaign outcomes.
Email marketing as a tool to engage, inform,
and build a great charity marketing campaign
Only 100 fellows made the cut to become fellows in each cohort. It was a key goal for the nudg team to keep the audience engaged and invested in the fellowship as the fellowship team went about their selection and interview processes.
Charity marketing campaigns benefit hugely from email marketing campaigns. They were working round the clock here with millions of emails being sent at the lowest cost and delivered into the inboxes of all aspirants. Keeping them informed about the latest updates.
Email marketing services from nudg helped reduce efforts for the SBI Foundation team. They were key to retaining the best fellows over the course of the overall campaign. Based on these outcomes, emailers were increased by 600% in subsequent campaigns.
Thousands interacted with chatbots to
learn about the fellowship
Young applicants usually have many questions about the fellowship before they make their decision to apply. Most would avoid asking them, while others would wait to get a response as the fellowship dealt with a flood of questions. To solve this challenge, the nudg tech and strategy team developed and set up a custom chatbot on the Facebook Messenger platform.
The chatbot not only answered questions, but also shared stories about fellows, informed the audience with the latest updates around the fellowship.
This Facebook chatbot has now become a key avenue for the brand to engage and grow its audience.
Campaign outcomes and successes
Success StoriesHaving nudg as marketing partner led to the fellowship seeing its most effective campaigns since its inception. Today, nudg works closely with the team to continuously improve and help build the fellowship into India’s most sought-after youth program, and will soon go on to making the program a global leader.
400%
more ideal leads
The campaign mix managed by nudg led to a significant boost in ideal leads based on key brand parameters.
81%
reduced CPC
By optimizing keywords, improved creatives and precise targeting strategies, CPC came down heavily.
15M
users reached
The campaign reached millions who helped us in the search for India’s best & brightest. All this with a frugal budget.
1807%
more profile visits
Instagram turned out to be a powerful tool and saw a huge jump in young users curious about fellowship buzz.
Other services included
Other ServicesThe campaigns also needed nudg to draw from its extended marketing services to help maximize outcomes for the brand. These included a blend of technology, marketing and strategic services, which also played a pivotal role in achieving the campaign outcomes the State Bank of India Foundation needed to ensure success.
Brand development
Graphic design
Web development
Cloud hosting
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