Depaul UK is a youth homelessness charity; being a charity they have little money to spend on communications. That’s why we took advantage of an event we knew the eyes of the press would already be on – the iPhone 6 launch at Apple’s flagship London store on Regent’s Street. This event also attracted our exact audience– young professionals; they’d become increasingly desensitised to homelessness and we wanted to jolt them into giving the issue more attention. The donor base for homeless charities is ageing and it’s therefore a key challenge for Depaul to capture and engage a younger audience.

We got to the queue as early as we could and got ourselves a spot in the coveted first 20; this meant we’d be first in on the day of launch. The idea: put the spot in the queue up for auction and capture the attention of the world’s press covering the launch.

With this stunt we highlighted the irony that so many young people were willing to sleep on the street for a new phone while many more, just like them, were forced to sleep rough. This was an angle we knew would attract the assembled media, and it certainly did.

Much of the coverage of the UK launch was focused wholly or in part on our stunt. We were featured in print and online by the UK’s leading daily press and by a whole host of other media outlets too. Accumulated earned media totalled £3,768,227. It cost £0.00.

At the centre of the campaign was a physical stunt. We occupied a place at the front of the iPhone 6 queue – putting the space up for sale to the highest bidder. The team in charge of the stunt coordinated with those in charge of the social media to maximise the attention from the street and grow the social buzz online.

Once the stunt began, the PR team got to work, driving coverage in national papers and pushing traffic to the eBay page.

One small space in a queue suddenly became national news – reaching a vast audience.

The results were astounding. The auction’s promotion drove the final bid to £570, not bad for an empty space. What was really amazing though was the reception it got from passers-by and the press. The Sun came to meet us, and gave us a half page feature. Online newspapers around the world picked up the stunt; The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Huffington Post to name a few. The response on social media was also phenomenal.

Accumulated earned media for the stunt came to £3,768,227. This equated to an increase of 5700% in terms of online visibility (Tracking from Pulsar), and best of all visits to depauluk.org rose 300%. What’s more loads of people came and shook our hands, and told us they loved the promo and what it stood for.

And the cost for all of this - £0.00, meaning the ROI was technically infinite.