Background
The NSPCC is one of the UK's leading children's charities, and its Christmas campaign is a major moment in the fundraising year.
The team came to Motives with a practical question: could they test their Christmas creative concepts properly without commissioning a large new production?
The challenge
The NSPCC wanted to understand how they could make the strongest Christmas campaign possible for 2026.
- Should they reuse their 2025 creative for 2026? Or would it be better to go further back and evolve an earlier year's campaign?
- If they evolved a previous ad, what needed to change to make it work harder?
The solution
The Insights team had a clever approach to getting a full view of what makes for an engaging Christmas creative: they tested new creative ideas alongside past campaigns, including the 2025 ad (their best performing to date), the 2024 ad, and earlier ads that had performed well during Covid.
Using the Motives platform, the NSPCC was able to interview people from the audience of their previous Christmas campaign. Participants were shown a mix of video and written descriptions of new creative concepts alongside the past creatives.
The Motives AI Moderator held a 45-minute video interview with each participant, probing on what worked and what didn't: which ideas landed, what felt unclear, and what would make them more likely to give.
Because the moderator asks open-ended follow-ups in the moment, the team heard spontaneous reactions in participants' own words and got a rich understanding of what was resonating.
Rachel Congdon, Head of Strategic, Consumer, & Brand Research, compared the Motives approach with more traditional creative testing tools - in the past she had used methodologies like dial testing to get a read on every scene:
“I was worried about whether we would get that granular, second-by-second, scene-by-scene feedback. I was skeptical that a 45-minute video interview would give us that level of detail, but actually we got it and much more.
With more traditional testing, you don't get the same richness of feedback as when people are able to be more discursive. I would say that with these AI-moderated interviews you get a much better depth and richness of data.”
The outcome
Participant feedback led to a number of changes to the creative and deeply informed the 2026 ad.
For example, a consistent theme was that participants felt the ending lacked hope, and that it wasn’t clear what the NSPCC does or where a donation would go. The team reworked the narrative to show more clearly what happens with the money when someone donates.
More practical changes were identified too: participants found the ad too dark, so the team adjusted the contrast to improve how it reads on screen.
What the NSPCC team said
Rachel Congdon, Head of Strategic, Consumer, & Brand Research, at the NSPCC highlighted three things about working with Motives: the speed of the research, how easy it is for non-research specialists such as marketing teams to use, and the quality of the outputs.
Rachel reflected on her overall experience:
“The research quality was great, and the speed was great. It was also unbelievably easy to get started with the study - we talked to a Motives researcher about it and used the AI assistant, and within about 30 seconds we had a discussion guide 95% done.”
The response beyond the insights team was positive too with the research having such an impact on the campaign. The creative agency was excited to work with the detailed feedback, and the ease-of-use of the Motives platform and outputs meant that the results could be shared and used across different teams, not only by research specialists.
