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How to Get People to Care About Stuff
Harnessing the unexpected is the key to designing a successful engagement campaign
For eight years I’ve been designing logos, brands, and engagement campaigns for a brand strategy and creative agency called Black Sheep. We’re called Black Sheep for all the reasons you might guess: We do things differently. We’re ahead of the curve. We break the rules. Blah, blah, blah, insert predictable design agency phrase here.
But here’s the thing: We DO do things in an unexpected way. Because when you build an engagement campaign, you have to differentiate your clients from everyone else or it won’t work. You won’t actually engage anyone. No one will connect with what you’re doing. And you won’t be able to stay in business long enough to employ the same person for eight years.
Black Sheep’s tagline is “We activate people around things that matter.” Believe me when I say I’ve got a ton of talking points around the second half of that sentence. We’re a social impact company and a B corp (B for benefit), so of course I can talk about the “things that matter.” But you’re a designer; you’ve probably got social good in your DNA and a whole lot of other people you can talk to about making a dent in the world. So today we’re talking about the first half of the tagline, because I think the “activating people” part is harder to do. Making people care about something they had no knowledge of previously is really difficult. Especially when you need a whole bunch of them to care for your client’s cause, or product, or service, or whatever, to succeed.
I’ll get to how we do that in a moment. But first, there’s a short list of should-go-without-sayings that we’re going to look at, and it goes a little something like this:
Write a brief
There’s been a lot of hullabaloo about creative briefs in recent years, but if you’ve not been paying attention, allow me to reiterate: Get on board with your team and your client about the goals, considerations, responsibilities, and outcomes of your work by generating a brief that outlines all these things and anything else useful to include. This is how we’ll all agree on the right direction later when we forget what our goals are in the midst of disagreements…
