To dramatize the critical need for a new SickKids hospital, and get the city emotionally invested in a building, we created a gritty, black-and-white direct campaign featuring real SickKids patients tearing apart their own homes with their bare hands, to salvage materials to build a new hospital by any means necessary. Through targeted and localized film, OOH, and one-to-one digital and emails, we profiled real SickKids patients in their own neighbourhoods rallying their fellow community members to represent their hood and join the fight by becoming a monthly donor to fund the new hospital.

We launched the campaign with a gritty two-minute black-and-white online film and :90 cutdown for TV featuring real SickKids patients desperately tearing apart their own homes and neighbourhoods, salvaging materials to build the new hospital by any means necessary. For OOH, local community businesses donated walls where we hand painted larger-than-life murals and pasted up wild postings, featuring local SickKids patients rallying their surrounding neighbourhood to become monthly donors. This was rounded out by an extensive one-to-one digital component featuring targeted and customized social media posts, banner ads, films, and emails, personalized by neighbourhood, and further segmented by target based on. Every medium linked potential donors back to our SickKids website where they could sign up to become a monthly donor and plant a flag in their neighbourhood.

This campaign resulted in an all-time fundraising record, contributing to an incredible $146 million dollar total. Both online donations and transactions increased ?21% YOY.