#MarketingExcellenceAwards highlight: Grab uses personalised reports to drive awareness of social impact

Grab has made a name for itself since its founding in 2012. The ride-hailing app has since expanded into the food delivery space and set foot into seven countries, including Malaysia and Indonesia. Grab currently has over nine million drivers, delivery partners, and agents, and works with restaurants, independent brick and mortar shops, as well as online social sellers. Despite being a renowned brand in Southeast Asia, consumers still do not perceive Grab as a brand that creates a positive social impact. To reverse this trend, the team decided to create GrabForGood personalised social impact reports to ensure consumers know that it cares. This led to Grab bagging the silver award for Excellence in Personalisation Marketing at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Marketing Excellence Awards 2020.

Challenge

Despite high-profile media coverage from 2019’s social impact report media launch involving several cabinet ministers – Grab noticed that there was a lack of genuine peer-to-peer online conversations, and thus very little customer brand traction. From September 2019 to March 2020, perception of Grab as a brand that creates positive social impact was either flat or decline in countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Philippines.

Hence, for its 2020 social impact report, the team had three main objectives: make people read, make people care, and make social impact matter.

1. Make people notice and read

The company aimed to beat historical norms for social impact report engagement. The goal was to ensure it is read at least 100,000 times or too times more than Grab's 2019 social impact report.

2. Make people care

Grab wanted to trigger 10,000 new peer-to-peer conversations online about one or more of Grab’s social impact facts.

3. Make social impact matter

The report aimed to improve Grab's perception as a company that creates positive social impact across the region and register a statistically significant uplift of more than three points for creating income opportunities for individuals and small businesses, and creating a positive impact for people in the country.

Strategy

Non-readers of social impact reports were not apathetic. According to Grab, they felt uninvolved. However, user behaviour was changing because the pandemic had placed a sudden spotlight on the impact on jobs and the economy. Hence, Grab noticed subtle changes in user behaviour, for example, more than 100,000 delivery and driver partners signing up when business shut and unemployment skyrocketed.

Its in-app survey also revealed that one of the reasons for tipping was to show appreciation or generosity for frontliners. This option has overtaken "rewarding good service" has the primary motivation for tipping during COVID-19. From these results, Grab noted that the pandemic has heightened people's desire to make a personal difference and triggered a sense of individual responsibility towards the community. Even though people were more frugal, Grab said doing good and connecting with strangers through acts of generosity was becoming a powerful force for social impact.

Based on this, Grab saw an opportunity to use its customer data in a new way to reframe andp personalise social impact numbers.

1. Shift the "credit" for Grab's cumulative social impact.

It shifted the focus from a company impact report, where the social and economic impacts are attributed to Grab as a company, to a community impact report that has empowered millions of individuals. In this case, the impact is the collective work of Grab's community of millions of users and small businesses.

Through this, Grab wanted to show the ripple effect of its orders creating income for drivers, restaurants, ingredient suppliers to those restaurants, and people employed by all these small businesses.

2. Hyper-personalised social impact reports

Grab produced millions of unique, personalised impact reports instead of one. Each Grab user had a different report based on his or her unique transactions.

Execution

The idea of the report was "A platform of millions, connected by good". Based on its social impact research, Grab found that every single transaction that users made on Grab had a bigger ripple effect on strangers than they could imagine. Hence, it decided to go beyond segmenting by using actual app data to hyper-personalise the impact each and everyone of its users made.

The data used include the number of times one provides an income opportunity to a driver or small business on the app, the local restaurants in one's neighbourhood that stayed afloat, and the names of drivers one helped support.

Each Grab user could initiate their own unique personalised impact report at a touch of a button within the app itself. Each report was hyper-personalised based on different preset variables: geographical location, their unique in-app transactions and behaviours. The company also built a direct share functionality into each personal impact report to allow users to share their impact on social media.

Meanwhile, two campaign films were also launched, showing actual stories of partners on the Grab platform to remind users that every transaction they make has a bigger impact than they imagine. Each film was told from the singular perspective of one micro-entrepreneur that was given a much-needed lifeline by transactions made by Grab users. Both films highlighted the hidden ripple effects of continuing to support a local restaurant or small business, and encouraged people to initiate their own hyper-personalised impact report.

At the same time, Grab also extracted 15 of the most interesting facts of collective social impact created by users, small businesses and partners in each country as well as across the region. This was to enable people to see and explore what their community's efforts amounted to.

Results

The initiative resulted in 97 million uniquely personalised social impact reports served and there were 1.8 million completed views of the reports. Its social impact website also had a 20 times increase in traffic during the campaign, from 4,482 times pre-campaign to 107,000 visits during campaign period.

The reports also triggered 18,724 direct shares of users’ personal stats from the app, and according to Grab, this surpassed its target with many more unrecorded shares through user screenshots on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn News also included some of these shares in its Editor Picks round-up of trending news in the month of June this year.

Meanwhile, it also saw a significant spike in imagery scores during the campaign period. Previously, consumer perception of Grab as a company that creates positive social impact across the region was flat. This time round, it increased by more than six points across the region.