2017 Winners

For 2016, SickKids’ challenge was to raise more money through online direct donations, leveraging as much existing content as possible. The previous year’s SickKids campaign saw 45 stories of 45 kid patients over 45 days. Cossette was asked to take that content and, with very little budget, leverage it to drive direct donations to the foundation. The challenge was that digital direct donations are hard to come by and require targeting a younger audience than the typically older donor.

This project was successful based on three key insights. First, there is a direct link between tangibility of outcome and the likelihood to donate. That is to say, millennials are more likely to donate if they believe that their donation will have a direct impact on the kids. Second, millennials are terrible with delayed gratification and require immediate response to their actions. Knowing this, the agency needed to leverage the content in a way that potential donors could affect the story or the outcome of the story, immediately. But, the stories were already written, so the team needed to find a way to advance the narrative. Third, when a child enters a hospital, it’s as if their life is put on pause – birthdays, recess, hanging out at home, everything comes to a sudden stand-still.

Using a campaign website, the team brought back six kids from the previous year’s campaign in video format and invited potential donors to play each video. The videos would start with video footage from the previous campaign. As the video hit a certain critical point, the video paused and asked the viewer if they would like to “unpause the video to see how the child was doing now.” If the viewer donated the video would continue (effectively unpausing the child’s life) and show them how the child is now living a healthy and happy life thanks to SickKids.

As the donor donated, their name would be registered along the video timeline in the same fashion as a Soundcloud comment, for all to see for as long as the site is live. Each child had a target set for the number of donations that would be required to “unpause” their story for good. When the target was reached, the team released the full videos out to the world via social media.

In the end, there was a 20% increase in online donations versus last year’s campaign. All six stories were unlocked in five weeks; the campaign generated 2.7 million video views; as well as 74.5 million generated media impressions.