Harrison is an eight year old boy dying from a disease called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. By the time he's a teenager Harrison will lose the ability to walk. Eventually he'll lose all muscle function in his body. Like all boys with Duchenne he'll die in his late teens or early twenties from heart or respiratory failure.

It’s a catastrophic, muscle wasting condition that leads to the deterioration of every single skeletal muscle in the body. It sounds like a horrible disease. And it is. Which is why we want to eradicate it.

We put the theory that the UK is twice as likely to donate to save an animal than to a child with the fatal disease Duchenne to the test.

We created two online UK ad’s on the same media network with the same weighting, identical in every way bar the image. One featured Harrison, the other showed a picture of a dog we found on the internet. Of the 350,757 impressions, Harrison’s advert received 111 clicks compared to the 230 of the dog ad – more than double.

So when some free space became available in the London Evening Standard we ran a press ad asking ‘would you give £5 to help save Harrison from a slow and painful death’? It then goes on to explain that the image of the dog isn’t Harrison, but that Harrison is an eight-year-old boy who has been diagnosed with the disease

The campaign only just launched a few months ago so we’re still monitoring the results but our one, simple ad has certainly grabbed attention. Newspapers covered the story and people have debated and donated from around the world.

And conversations really took off online too. Facebook reach increased by over 30% and engagement increase by almost 60%. A brilliant result as there was no paid promotion and this was entirely a result of engagement with the ad.

Harrison’s Fund as gone from raising £190, 000 in 2012 to £410,000 in 2014. And our awareness campaign has definitely got noticed and helped track 10 to 20% above that for the first four months of this year.