Third Sector Awards 2022: Shortlisted for Marketing Campaign of the Year
This campaign, created during lockdown, positions Barts Charity as ‘East London’s NHS Charity’.
The two of us, working closely with our clients and partners, delivered upwards of 50 pieces of content for the campaign across three waves. We took care of the planning, the creative work and the production.
The strategy was to make Barts Charity more clearly synonymous with the hugely popular local NHS that it helps to support. We wanted to make it clear that when you support Barts Charity you are supporting East London’s NHS. And, by extension, that supporting East London’s NHS can be done by supporting Barts Charity.
To do this, we commissioned award-winning photographer Peter Zelewski (Faces of London) to create a suite of beautiful, street-cast portraits of members of the East London community, NHS staff and local celebrities. These photos were then used to show people expressing their support for their local NHS and Barts Charity.
The photographs were complemented by ten online films - including one longer, campaign film - in which we replicated the style of the print. In these films, members of the public and celebrities gave more substantive reasons why they support East London’s NHS and Barts Charity.
As well as this, we were tasked with a secondary objective of helping grow the Barts Charity donor database. This we did by commissioning a free badge for the public to send off for and wear as an outward symbol of support for East London’s NHS. In return for the badge, the supporter gave their details and permissions for future fundraising appeals. This is a playbook tactic, rather than an original idea.
The campaign ran across 48-sheets, bus-stop ads, bus sides, ticket halls, press, outdoor ads in East London and, of course, online.
Agency: Rogue
Toybox are a small charity devoted to helping street children in Latin America.
They approached us early in 2020 to create their annual Easter appeal for them. The charity had already enjoyed great success asking donors for birth certificates, based on a Christmas appeal Robbie created for them in 2013, and now they were looking for a new fundraising ask to serve as an alternative to this valuable income stream.
Our strategic solution was to identify six potential asks and bring them together into one mini-catalogue of gifts. The donor could choose which gift they wanted to give to help an outreach worker meet a street children’s immediate needs. The plan was that donors, once engaged, would buy more than one gift (perhaps all of them) to help increase the average gift – something vital for a charity with a relatively small donor base.
However, there is little value in helping a child survive today if they are still on the streets tomorrow. We found that the true value in distributing these items is that they enable outreach workers to build trust with the children so that, over time, they can work with them to leave the streets for good (which is the core of Toybox’s work).
So the creative idea was that this was ‘not just’ a gift catalogue. And each gift included was ‘not just’ a way to meet the children’s short-term needs. Every gift also had the power to help a child escape the streets for good.
The appeal ran across direct mail and social and, we hope, is a product that will continue beyond Easter, with catalogues available to distribute at events and suchlike.
The campaign beat its target by more than 300%. It also drew a much higher average gift than projected, with many donors electing to buy all the itemised gifts for children, just as we had hoped.
Agency: Rogue
#MakeItCount is a community fundraising platform developed for RAF Benevolent Fund in late 2019. This job is special to us as it marked our first competitive pitch win as Rogue and gave us our first opportunity to work directly with a client.
It was a mammoth job to plan, create and deliver with over 20 pieces of work to produce in a short space of time. But by working closely with the Fund’s community fundraisers around the UK, we found the challenge to be a productive and enjoyable one. Our direct way of working helped ensure that all client comments were listened to, taken on board and implemented in a collaborative way. It also helped ensure the creative vision remained uncompromised throughout.
At the heart of the campaign is a 16-page fundraising toolkit that would-be fundraisers can download or be sent by post. Along with the toolkit, we created a raft of useful fundraising materials that could help people in their efforts to raise money. You can see a selection of these pictured to the right. Everything else can be found here
A special shout out to our artwork partner Paul Bygraves who was fabulous in getting the offline work ready for print.
Agency: Rogue
DMA: Bronze
DMA: Finalist
What began as a pitch mood film became the RSPCA’s first ever brand TV ad.
‘A World that’s Kinder to Animals’ features a poem (written by Simon with a nod to John Cooper Clarke) and dramatises how all our choices and actions have an impact – and that everyone, young and old, has a part to play in creating the ‘kinder world’ we want to see.
The campaign was supported by social and display ads, with A Guide to Animal Kindness as a further engagement tool. It also earned a DMA Bronze 2018 for Best Charity along with a nomination for the TV ad in Best Writing.
Agency: Arthur
In late 2021, we helped Barts Charity launch a major-giving campaign to some of London’s wealthiest individuals.
The aim was to raise £90 million for two new health centres at the Trust: a state-of-the-art Breast Cancer Centre at Barts Hospital, and a new Clinical Research Centre at the Royal London. The campaign was to mark Barts’ 900th anniversary.
At the heart of the campaign was an A4, 72 page prospectus for potential donors which set out our proposition in detail.
Strategically, we positioned the centres as marking the start of a new era of socially just and personalised healthcare – East London being ideally positioned to lead the world in overcoming health inequalities.
Creatively, we commissioned photographer Nick Turpin to capture the essence of the ‘here and now’ of East London and of the projects we are outlining. His cityscapes in particular give the reader a real sense of the community into which the new centres will integrate.
The feedback so far is good, with a number of professors telling the charity that the booklet is the best of its kind they’ve ever seen.
(Sometimes a website doesn’t do justice to a piece of work, and this is one such case. The work is best viewed in its full, printed glory – but we have included a few spreads here to get the idea across.)
Agency: Rogue
Robbie created this pitch-wining integrated campaign for World Vision in the summer of 2018. It consists of a manifesto film for a new brand platform (Childhood is Sacred) and a Christmas digital campaign.
The brief for the digital campaign was to raise awareness and donations to stop child slavery. The client was advised against the urge to show too many pictures of children with guns and suchlike. Christmas is a time of warmth and that imagery felt off-putting.
Instead, it was decided that the work should tug at the heart strings by talking of what it means when a childhood is lost – as it is so often is in the cases of child soldiers, child sex workers and child labourers.
The insight was this: when a child loses a toy on the street, it can feel like the end of the world for them. So how much worse must it be for a child who loses everything as a result of child slavery?
The idea was to leave 2,000 ‘lost’ teddy bears in key locations around the UK where the child sponsorship demographic was most pronounced. A tag on the bear’s wrist made our case and asked for a picture the bear to be shared on social media.
The campaign was launched with a teaser campaign in local and national newspapers. and followed up with local PR stories and on the World Vision facebook page.
The manifesto film, created internally, is perhaps the highlight of the campaign.
Agency: VCCP
Cannes Lions: Finalist
Kinsale Sharks: Gold
Berlin Ciclopes: Bronze
Dementia UK provides specialist dementia support for families through its Admiral Nurse service, the only national service of this kind.
Simon created this 3-minute film aimed to raise awareness of the valuable service and to drive an increase in the number of commissioned nurses across the UK. ‘Together Again’, brings to life how, in the face of this isolating condition, Admiral Nurses can help families reconnect for precious moments together.
Thee film ran across digital and social media channels and was supported by a 30” radio ad. This film alone drove an 805% increase in views of Dementia UK’s online information pages, and was shortlisted in the 2018 Cannes Lions, won gold for best original music at Kinsale and a bronze at the Berlin Ciclope for best film under 50k.
Agency: Arthur
'“Never in the field of human conflict, was so much owed, by so many – to so few.”
Winston Churchill’s tribute to the sacrifice and valour of the Royal Air Force during WWII was the perfect starting point for this animation. The nostalgia and pride people feel for RAF servicemen and women from yesteryear up to the present day is not to be underestimated.
In this legacy ad, past and present sacrifices are brought together to tell the story of two RAF veterans. The use of animation allowed the budget to stretch to bring all the drama to the screen while allowing the film to transition from the past to the present field of combat.
Through the film, social posts, and a free legacy guide and art print signed by a WWII spitfire pilot and taken from an animation still – the response far exceeded its target, driving 465 enquiries from a limited TV airing, and generating 585 leads from the social posts. MC&C – our media partner – said this is the best cost-per-acquisition they have ever seen in their agency for a legacy campaign.
Agency: Arthur
Campaign Big: Silver.
Cannes Lions: Finalist
When UNICEF were making the transition towards becoming a rights-focused organisation, they spoke to Robbie about the problem of child marriage – something that affects 37,000 girls every day.
They wanted to know if there was an opportunity to create a cost-effective campaign about this violation that would raise awareness and recruit new donors.
Of course, the answer was yes (the answer is always yes). It was decided the best time to launch this campaign would be around the upcoming Royal Wedding, at a time when marriage would be the talk of the country.
The result was the integrated ‘Speak Now’ campaign that you can see here: a mobile donation campaign that beat its financial target.
This campaign was boosted by a PR stunt, in which we created a satirical, ceremonial plate featuring an old man and a young bride and sent it to a number of journalists. We asked the journalists to write about the subject to give it much-needed publicity. This led to double page spreads in the Guardian and Grazie magazine.
We appreciate that cultural traditions are never to be criticised lightly. But the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child is a treaty that has been ratified by every civilised nation (only the United States has declined) and is not a matter of subjectivity. It is legally a matter of right and wrong.
Agency: Rapp
British Arrows: Finalist
When Simon was at Bluefrog, he was tasked by Mark (Bluefrog’s MD) with putting the issue of HIV/AIDS and safe sex back at the forefront of people's minds.
The resulting film was given a limited post-11pm showing on Channel 4 and gained over 250k YouTube views directing traffic to the website, where a £20 box of bedroom delights for you and yours awaited with most of the proceeds going to sex education in deprived communities globally. Tweets from Steven Fry, Paloma Faith and Stuart Broad helped things along on the PR front.
The production company – Toast – entered the film for a British Arrow Award and were nominated. For his sins, Simon is the one yelping in the fox outfit. Blink and you’ll miss it.
Agency: Bluefrog
Put it Right was a TTL fundraising platform created to help reposition UNICEF as a rights-based organisation.
A fully-integrated campaign was created to help with this repositioning, including the two TVCs we’ve included here.
In moving to a rights based approach, Robbie needed to take a slightly different approach to DRTV. The featured children were not to be seen as objects, whose misery was to be manipulated and fictionalised for donations. We were fundraising for their lives. We needed to show respect for them and reality of their situation, or else UNICEF ran the risk of not practising what they were paying us to preach.
The ads were directed by Adrian Moat, edited by James Rosen and accompanied by by below-the-line and ambient materials. The campaign line ‘Put It Right’ was written by Mary Wear.
The footage was allowed breathe by using the voice over (Ewan McGregor) sparingly and focusing on the power of the edit. This allowed the human dignity of the children to shine through, even in these appalling situations.
Agency: Rapp
The RSPCA do more work than many people realise. Long gone are the days when they were famous only for rescuing kittens stuck up chimneys or prosecuting animal abusers.
These days they also run a number of community programmes to teach kids – many from disadvantaged backgrounds – about the importance of animal welfare and of caring for wildlife. They believe that by fostering kindness and compassion in children towards all animals, they can create a future that is truly kinder to animals.
What a great idea.
What they needed from Simon, during his time at Arthur, was a way to present these innovative programmes to their high-value donors, under one unifying prevention strategy while working within the new brand position of ‘It takes all of us to create a world that’s kinder to animals’.
Agency: Arthur
Campaign Direct Finalist - Broadcast
John Caples Awards - Finalist x2
The NSPCC’s ‘FULL STOP’ campaign was one of the most successful charity campaigns of all time.
Out of the many pieces Robbie created for this long-running campaign, we’ve picked three to include here.
Firstly, a DRTV ad – ‘Just Children’ – directed by Shona Auerbach, featuring ‘This Woman’s Work’ by Kate Bush (our target market were mothers) and a voice over by Michael Sheen. This ad achieved a 35% uplift on response and a 12% uplift on ROI against a seemingly unbeatable 9 year control (“Miles is a quiet baby…” ) and was a Campaign Direct finalist for Broadcast.
Secondly, the Apology pack. This also beat an ‘unbeatable’ control and ran for six or seven years. Drayton Bird once wrote to say he used this letter in his workshops around the world as an example of good fundraising copy. Robbie was asked to write about how he wrote the letter (meta) for the SOFII fundraising website.
Finally, we’ve included one of the most successful donor mailings of the campaign – which used a crayon to fundraise for the NSPCC’s Therapeutic Services. The pack featured in the ‘Directory’ creative annual.
Agency: WWAV Rapp Collins
Life begins with water.
This is the simple truth that underpins this successful legacy campaign for WaterAid.
Every initiative that is undertaken in the developing world depends first on the presence of clean water.
Schools, livelihoods, hospitals, hope … they all start with H2O.
And the moment you see that the chemical symbol ‘H2O’ can be dropped into many of these words, you know you are onto a winner.
Featured here are a campaign film, a mailer, some social content and the entrance to the WaterAid offices, where the campaign was used internally (or externally if we are to be literal about it.)
Agency: Arthur
The objective here was to give a rich and personal year-long experience to new supporters of UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency)
The donor was taken to Za’atari Refugee Camp in Jordan, introduced to the Syrian families who live there, told their their stories, and shown the impact their donations have through seven basic provisions for survival during a families time on the camp.
These provisions were: REGISTRATION, SHELTER, WATER, EDUCATION, MEDICINE, FOOD. Plus, a final THANK YOU for the supporters at the end of their year of providing these vital supplies.
A team were flown to the camp for four days to gather a year’s worth of content – case-study videos, still photos (taken by Sebastian Rich), sound, and – of course – the homepage 360-degree shot (which was taken from the roof of a land rover). This content then appeared across the 360-degree camp view and new areas of the site unlocked every two months and each time a new provision was introduced.
The campaign was supported with very simple mailings to say thank you for the WATER or MEDICINES etc, provided in the last two months, and to deliver the positive ‘big picture’ results of the donor’s continued support.
Agency: Bluefrog
DMA: Gold
DMA: Bronze x2
Over 1,100 people living with diabetes contributed to this campaign, giving hints and tips on living well with diabetes.
These people were were integral to every phase of the work, including collating and editing the content they gave us down to the final 100 tips for our (their) book – 100 Things I Wish I’d Known About Living with Diabetes.
The TV ad featured real people living with diabetes giving their favourite tips and recommending the book that they themselves had helped to create. People living with diabetes also featured in all other media executions and the book was promoted through Diabetes UK’s own social channels and through the diabetes community.
The campaign received an unprecedented response, resulting in only 56% of the planned TV spend being necessary to achieve its target. The actual responses to the TV were 157,143 against a target of 15,972. Respondents were put on an email stewardship journey leading to membership, which led to twice as many new members than our client was hoping for.
The total campaign responses read like this:
Actual 171,816 vs. target 24,823. Facebook engagement rate: Actual 43% vs. target 2%.
Agency: Arthur
