The Petro-Canada CareMakers Foundation (PCCF) was started in 2020 to raise awareness and support for Canada’s over 8 million family caregivers. The cause itself is one without significant charitable support in Canada, and as much as the Foundation had low awareness, so too did the cause itself.

In 2022, PCCF wanted to create a campaign that would bring the struggle of these underserved Canadians to light and build on the awareness it created when it launched.

We needed to make Canadians aware not just of the newly formed Petro-Canada CareMakers Foundation, but to put the issue of family caregiving on their radar for the first time.

Family caregivers are all around us, but unless we have experience ourselves with caregiving, we don’t know the true burden that’s placed on them. To help Canadians realize this, we decided we needed to bring to life exactly what caregivers go through.

Truly showing what Canada’s family caregivers go through was something that would be challenging to fit in a standard 30-second TV spot. We wanted to do justice to the complexity and emotionality of caregiving and felt we needed to take a different approach to do it.

So, we created the world’s first 24-hour caregiving experience. 24 Hours of Care is a digital experience built around 24 hours of footage captured in the lives and in the homes of real family caregivers. It put the full spectrum of what they do every single day to Canadians in an engaging digital experience.

The experience tells the story of real family caregivers as they go through their days and nights. Users are brought into their homes and are first-hand witnesses to everything the caregivers do. The happy moments, the hard moments, and the sad ones too.

The central heart of the campaign lived at 24HoursOfCare.ca, our interactive digital experience that truly brings the 24-hour video to life. We extended this online experience to TV, OOH, online video and social with each touchpoint serving to educate Canadians on the struggle and triumphs of everyday caregivers.

The campaign was an immediate success, with media picking up on its unique nature and featuring it on their newscasts, including on Global News Morning and CTV’s The Social.

This extended the reach of the campaign and helped us see a 64% increase in awareness of PCCF, and a 53% increase in awareness of the issue of caregiving compared to the period prior to the campaign.

And because the idea was so innovative, we were able to secure over $300,000 in earned media from partners, taking this campaign further into users’ homes and devices by expanding reach across all platforms. This was in addition to the national coverage as part of the PSA agreement.