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