Untangling Humour

So one thing I'm seeing a lot at the moment is that businesses maybe want to use humour, but they play it quite safe because I think we're living in quite puritanical times.

So if you get it ever so slightly wrong... then you get a load of abuse on social media and then it's damaging to the brand.

So what advice would you give to other businesses that maybe just they want to try using humour more, but they're feeling a bit nervous?

Yeah, there's a few things, isn't there? I think the first thing is you have to understand that you're not marketing to everyone.

If you understand your audience, you can understand how you can engage them.

If your audience is everyone, then you're never going to possibly please them.

Part of our ethos in the charity is part of our induction is we're not for everyone and that's OK.

As a charity, our job is to support as many people as possible, but we know we're not going to resonate with everyone.

What we do is make sure that we have all of the other stakeholders around us, other charities, other organizations.

We know all of them.

We have great relationships.

Someone comes to us.

And they are perhaps, I don't know, a 70-year-old lady affected by ovarian cancer.

She might not want to engage with us because it just doesn't feel like things she's comfortable with.

We know all the charities around us that we can support them.

Similarly, if we get someone in what we consider our main age range, 15 to 45, and we think we're going to resonate with them, but we don't, for whatever reason, we can pass them off onto another charity and go, look, here is a support from another great organisation that can help you.

So...

We're not about turning anyone away, but we know our audience and we know who we're talking to at all times.

That also helps us clearly find what is okay and what is not okay.

You know, swearing, not going to be okay with some people, but it's okay with our core audience, our hashtags, all of those sort of things.

That sort of leads into the piece where if you put something out, you want to be able to say it was authentic to you.

You never want to force.

That's the scene setting for never feeling like you're forcing content or forcing someone to laugh about something that isn't right for your audience.

So once you've got your tone and your voice, you can stay authentic to you.

Everything that we put out, whether it's right or wrong for a particular person, we can say organizationally, we're okay with that.