From an overcrowded market, with very little differentiation of offerings, Comic Relief created a strategic advantage, made us laugh and got us donating more than ever to charity. We can use this strategic thinking process and apply it to any business.
Friday 17th March 2023 was Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day in the UK.
Comic relief is one of the UK’s most recognised and successful charities. It has managed to achieve both high performance (over £34M raised from its 2023 event, over £1B since it’s inception) and ultra-low-cost.
There are 2 simple tools, from the Blue Ocean Strategy process that captures the heart of how you can apply this thinking to your organisation: the Strategy Canvas and the 4 Actions Framework (copyrite of Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, used with permission).
In the next article I’ll cover how to use the strategy canvas for your own business, but first, let’s get into what a strategy canvas is and why it’s such an impactful tool to use in the development of your strategy. We’ll use Comic Relief as an example.
A strategy canvas is a visual representation of the main factors your industry, or market, competes on. Simple as that. These factors are rated on the degree of importance/effort/focus, as viewed by the competing businesses (not as viewed by the customers).
Here is the strategy canvas for the traditional UK charity market, prior to Comic Relief.
We can see, for example, they all put a lot of effort into pity pleas, fundraising is a major cost and they have year-round events.
They put a medium level of effort into the transparency of operations and recognition of donors.
If you plotted any one charity in the UK it would look pretty much like the mock-up of this collective group. There will be exceptions, but all we need is a high-level industry view.
From a customer’s (in this case a donor) perspective, there isn’t any real difference between charities, no one jumps out, despite there being thousands of charities. This is what Blue Ocean strategists call a red ocean – a place where everyone is battling it out, investing in the same business model, approach and offerings. A lot of wasted effort, motivation and time.
So now you see the traditional charity market with fresh eyes, what next? If you are Comic-Relief-in-the-making, then you use this canvas to see where your customer’s (donor) pain points are and who your industry’s non-customers are. I’ll cover each of these in later posts.
Comic-Relief-in-the-making would have taken these insights and asked: what could we create, eliminate, reduce and raise to craft an entirely new proposition of increased value with reduced cost?
In summary here is what Comic Relief created, eliminated, raised and reduced:
CREATED:
They created a fun and a star-studded comedy event. By accepting and embracing even the smallest of donations they created a new way to interact and participate from all demographics, anyone can get involved in the fun, not just wealthy donors. It’s easy, and personal, to take part by sponsoring a friend, colleague or family member for something fun, or just buy a red nose for £1.
ELIMINATED:
They eliminated appeals to pity.
RAISED:
They raised the level of corporate sponsorship enabling Comic Relief’s running costs to be covered by corporate sponsorship, not donations. Donors are visible and recognised – there are examples of children being recognised on TV for donating their pocket money. Corporate donors are publicly recognised for their support.
They raised transparency of operations (celebrities, networks and TV studios give their time and resources for free) and over 80% of donations go to the charitable causes (compared to indsutry standard of 45%).
REDUCED:
By reducing events, such as gala dinners, and advertising campaigns they dramatically reduced fundraising costs. They cut the event cycle to once every 2 years rather than continuous events.
This results in a very different strategy canvas from the rest of their industry.
Straight away we can see how Comic Relief’s strategy canvas shows a clear divergence from the market, it looks entirely different. We can see where they added customer value and we can see where they reduced costs.
A good strategy is that clear and easy to communicate.
Just making the start towards a great strategy by plotting your industry, or market’s, canvas will give you insights into where there are opportunities to reduce costs, and where there are opportunities to innovate and create new customers.
If you already have a great strategy then you can use the canvas to communicate just how your strategy works, how it’s different, what you will be doing / not doing. It’s an excellent strategy communication tool.
If you want to explore how to model the strategy canvas for your industry and create a strategy that will enable you to stand apart then you can use this guide to creating a canvas yourself.
Explore more about how Strategy Consulting can support your business or book a discovery call.
The Strategy Canvas, 4 Action Framework are copyrights of Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy & Blue Ocean Shift. Used with permission. The Comic Relief case study is adapted from Blue Ocean Shift and HBR artcle “Closing the Gap Between Blue Ocean
