People who do amazing things to help others tend to be modest about their achievements.

And people who need help the most are often the least likely to ask for it.

These human truths are two of the reasons why people don’t know how Macmillan can help when the shadow of cancer is cast on their lives.

A significant proportion of Macmillan’s core audience either don’t know how Macmillan can help them or don’t feel as though they have the right to ask for help.

They tend to be digitally disconnected and lack the capacity to take action themselves.

Targeting this audience was key but we also needed to talk to their friends and family who are crucial in opening up a world of invaluable online resource that can help those living with cancer.

However, for us to help, they actually needed to know that Macmillan was the answer.

For a campaign designed to get people talking about cancer, we put the UK’s most famous ‘listener’ at its heart - Deidre, the beloved agony aunt from the UK’s biggest selling newspaper The Sun (read by 5.5m Brits every day).

In the first ever brand partnership with Dear Deidre, we used her page in The Sun to communicate directly with readers – every week, for 9-months.

Across nine months we created 439 different pieces of native content, which were seen by one third of the UK population.

We re-branded Dear Deidre’s page in Macmillan colours each week, and weekly content on the page included:

• a cancer-related letter which connected those in need back to Macmillan

• and a new feature called ‘Angel of the Week’, which celebrated those who have helped or supported someone with cancer.

All of this was supplemented by hundreds of additional long-form stories about Macmillan’s services.

Our native approach got the UK talking about cancer.

Deidre received a tenfold increase in cancer-related letters.

Awareness of Macmillan’s services increased 29%.

Propensity to use Macmillan’s services increased 32%.

And our econometric analysis showed that the campaign directly drove more than 8000 incremental calls to the Macmillan Cancer Support line – the equivalent of 1 in every 34 people in the UK who were diagnosed with cancer during the campaign.

By talking about remarkable people doing remarkable things, we’d delivered remarkable results. For everyone.