People who’ve volunteered to build a school say it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. Which begs the question…if you’re not volunteering, what are you doing? Not a lot it turns out.

Knowing that our audience loves to waste time, we created the ‘What the fuck have you done campaign?’.

An online film, using grains of sand, highlighted the many ways our audience waste their time. And added up just how much of their life they squander. Then we compared those numbers with the comparatively small amount of time it takes to volunteer on a Mellon Educate trip.

But we didn’t stop there. If they didn’t respond we then suckered them in with ‘clickbait’ videos - using popular online themes such as ‘Hot Girl Fail’, ‘Cute Puppy’ and ‘Trick Shot’ - to further highlight how much time they waste, and to encourage them to act.

An online film, using grains of sand, pointed out how our audience wasted many hours of their life on unrewarding tasks, concluding that with just seven days of their time they could build a school in Africa. So far so normal.

We then created a set of ‘click bait’ videos to accompany the campaign to encourage those who didn’t click on the video first time to engage further with the charity. The videos used popular online themes such as ‘Hot Girl Fail’, ‘Cute Puppy’ and ‘Trick Shot’ to draw the viewer in, but each one caught the viewer out and asked them why they were wasting their time watching this video when they could be building a school in Africa. On YouTube, the videos auto-played after the main video as per the YouTube player. On Facebook, the videos were used to retarget people who had already seen the main film.

Native Reach 26.2million

Impressions: 2,099,198 in the first week

Views 370,443 (6,775 YouTube // 363,668 Facebook) in the first week

Engagements: 8,093

Website clicks: 600% increase from 50 to 300/day