Comic Relief create safe and inclusive socials in support of fundraising goals

Comic Relief are one of the UK’s leading charities and globally famous for their annual Red Nose Day event, which raises over £50m a year for good causes around the world.

SITUATION

The vast majority of the online interactions they receive are 100% positive about the charity’s mission, but a handful choose to post hateful or discriminatory comments, which unfortunately spoils the experience for everyone else. The problem of toxic content online has increased over recent years.

"During our big fundraising periods we see huge spikes in engagement, leading to thousands of comments and interactions. These all need to be individually reviewed / responded to by our social team. Occasionally we would receive hateful comments or be targeted by trolls. We wanted to reduce the negative and upsetting impact that reviewing these could have on our team, and on the public when seeing them."

Louise Bruce-Tresnan, Digital Content & Creative Lead at Comic Relief

SOLUTION

Arwen approached Comic Relief offering to help them tackle this issue in time for the 2022 campaign. Firstly, we got Arwen authorised on their different Social Media profiles on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This meant that Arwen could analyse all the content coming through. Our Data Science team analysed what was being received and categorised them into 24 different types of unwanted content.

We took the Comic Relief Social Media team through a structured exercise to agree a threshold for each of these types of content, in line with Comic Reliefs social policies above which Arwen would automatically hide things. Comic Relief wanted to ensure their social channels reflected their brand and values and their broad online demographic of followers would not be subjected to hateful, racist or homophobic comments.

IMPACT

• Significant reduction in the time spent by the Digital Content team finding and removing unwanted content
• The social team had more time to focus on community management and content creation.

“Arwen means that hateful and toxic comments never see the light of the day, which is really reassuring for me, the team and our followers.” 

Louise Bruce-Tresnan, Digital Content & Creative Lead at Comic Relief