One of the more talked about marketing experiences created for virtual reality (VR) has been UNICEF’s Clouds Over Sidra, and earlier this month the Global Fundraising Specialist from the charity spoke about how it was worth the cost to produce VR marketing strategies and how it halved the time it took to get a new donor on board with the charity.
During an interview with an Eventbrite journalist, UNICEF’s David Cravinho was asked about the VR video, Clouds Over Sidra and VR as a whole. The concept of the video is to put potential donors in the shoes of those they are donating money to, Syrian refugees, and encouraging them to practise more empathy than if they were approached face-to-face on the street. Cravinho expressed that he was concerned about the cost of developing VR content because headsets hadn’t previously been accessible and they had to use a lot of CGI during the video, which all racked up more costs than the usual campaign.
However, he then said that the public had responded differently and more positively to the video, with people in Coratia “queuing 40 minutes to have a go, which is unheard of”. He went on to talk about the effectiveness in stats: “On average, it might take a fundraiser somewhere between 10-13 conversations to get one regular donor, but with VR that number is more likely to be five or six.”
Even though Cravinho believed that the effectiveness would perhaps soon wear off a little, he didn’t deny that the video itself had a long lasting impact: “That reaction is true across the different cultures where we show it; people have a very strong emotional response to it and that’s due to the content not the novelty behind it.”
UNICEF is looking into using more VR in its moneyraising, but knows it needs to keep in mind that it cannot show too much: “If we’re going to be using VR, as a sector we have to be very aware not to dial it up to 10. People who are walking down the street just going about their business are not expecting to be thrust into a situation and see a woman dying in front of them. It’s important to bear in mind how much more immersive VR content is.”
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