RNLI Innovation Pipeline

Story

An icon on both land and sea. The RNLI has become synonymous with British coastlines, but survives predominately on legacy donations ​as people pass on their estates. To continue their life-saving work with confidence, they needed to diversify their donation sources, and find other means of monetisation. Through prior research we knew that the RNLI was struggling with affinity amidst younger audiences and those from in-land cities. Our task was to produce a pipeline of innovation concepts that could help stir new life, and new revenue, into the RNLI. 

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Approach

Through a series of internal workshop and client-facing co-creation sessions, we produced a shortlist of a dozen concepts that we felt could achieve the project's goals. Trend and role model analysis brought forth a number of key conceptual pillars such as Secret Dining Experiences, Micro-Adventures and Ocean in the city. From here, ideas such as the following were developed; 

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Wild Swim - A themed and competitive outdoor swimming event, adjusted for all ages and abilities. 

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Fizz and Chips - A lo-fi, low-cost night to be hosted at your local, bringing together the best of ocean and city. 

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Alternative Weekends - Utilising old RNLI outposts and assets, creating pseudo-camping accommodation.

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Extreme challenges - Experience lifeguard training via a series of tough-testing ocean and land challenges.

 

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To validate these routes, and determine which would resonate best with our target audiences, we ran two focus groups with 24 pre-screened participants in bias-neutral Bristol. Several exercises worked through polarising opining, enabling us to sift the universally-mediocre from the niche-but-adored, with participants given the chance to build and adapt the ideas. This qual phase was followed by a quant test of the six leading concepts, so that we could pair intimate feedback with validation at scale. 

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Outcomes

The project produced a three leading and refined concepts that were added to RNLI's innovation pipeline for MVP development, having been validated by 24 focus group participants and 500 quant participants. This became the foundation of business case to explore the feasibility of each concept at scale, with a number of further well-researched concepts added to the backlog.