Situation:

Prior to COVID-19, Australia was making global headlines with the worst bushfires since 1938.

Days after the bushfires ceased, COVID-19 arrived. With strict lockdowns imposed, the Australian public were plunged into the worst unemployment rates since 1998.

Unsurprisingly, this hindered Australia’s generosity, as the charity sector experienced a dramatic 7.1% decrease in overall donations for 2020.

Brief:

Whitelion is a small charity that has a clear purpose: rehabilitating homeless youth. Unfortunately, 94% of overall donations are given to the most well-established charities, leaving charities like Whitelion fighting for the scraps.

Social distancing regulations had stripped Whitelion of its entire fundraising calendar and with it, over 70% of their annual donation’s revenue.

Objectives:

Our objective was simple: High impact visibility with almost zero budget.

Whitelion needed to plug the gap of lost revenue to not only secure their survival, but also to secure the future of 497 highly vulnerable teens.

Over 44,000 young people have no home address, so on World Homeless Day, for 24 hours, Australia’s biggest brands donated their digital home address to raise awareness for those without a physical home address.

Amidst a year of unprecedented challenges, we knew realistically there would be only one day when helping homeless youth would get proper attention. And that was World Homeless Day. So, this was our golden opportunity to activate our idea.

We supplied a single line of code to all brands taking part that created a pop up which appeared on their homepages and encouraged people to donate to help homeless youth.

COVID-19 caused a massive shift to online shopping in Australia. By turning the digital shopfronts of some of Australia’s most visited brands into a donation appeal, we overshadowed the charity sector’s goliaths and ensured some of Australia’s most vulnerable people weren’t forgotten amidst the pandemic.

Whilst a slew of industries slowed down, online shopping did not. In fact, during COVID-19, online shopping surged to a record 62% year-on-year – which was five times the rate of traditional retail sales growth. Never before had brand homepages achieved this level of reach. Tapping into this trend would allow us to surpass any media reach that even the Goliaths would be able to afford.

Nevertheless, we knew that corporations would still be in survival mode and hyperconscious with where they utilised their budgets. So, our strategy was to make it easy for them to still help. Instead of donating money, all they needed to do was give us access to their online traffic for a single day.

A single day when helping homeless youth would get some proper attention: World Homeless Day.

The technology to execute was simple. A single line of code created a simple pop-up overlay, turning Australia’s most visited homepage addresses into donation portals for Whitelion. Brands simply embedded the line of code onto their website homepage. From there we were able to sync up the total donations data on the core Whitelion campaign page.

However, getting the brands on board was anything but simple. We worked tirelessly over many months to reach out, explain the idea and manage all their concerns about implementing code onto their ecommerce websites.

Eventually over 39 brands donated their homepages to ‘No Home Address’ and additional brands also donated OOH media space, raising further awareness of the donation drive.

Based on daily views across the homepages involved, we reached over 25 million people in 24 hrs.

Our objective: High impact visibility with almost zero budget.

We needed to raise as much money as possible for the survival of Whitelion, and more importantly, the homeless and at-risk youths they support.

In 24 hours, we collectively raised $231,912 – the largest donation figure Whitelion has ever received. In fact, we raised almost the exact same amount as the Salvation Army did in 6 weeks ($240K) but within a 24-hour timespan.

Our second indicator of success was our substantial cut-through despite limited resources. ‘No Home Address’ reached over 25 million people in just 24 hrs (based on daily website views) spreading awareness of Whitelion’s brand message across the country.

From an ROI perspective, our only hard cost was the technical development required to setup the homepage overlay. When we subtract the total campaign costs ($5,116.73) from the total revenue raised ($231,912.00) this leaves us with an ROI of 4,432%