Even before COVID, private charitable donations were falling like a stone: 8% year-on-year 2016-8. Furthermore, between 2016-19, there were 3,953 new charities and foundations formed. A shrinking pie was being cut into even more pieces.

Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation (SCHF), Australia’s largest paediatric healthcare entity needed help. The variety of illnesses and injuries that are treated by the Network, the types of care that they offer and the research that they fund is vast.

The trouble with this diversity is two-fold: comprehension and identification.

In the face of donation fatigue, competitive congestion and increasing economic volatility, our brief was to generate additional, sustainable funds with a good return on investment.

We also had some clear parameters:

1. Do not cannibalise existing fundraising efforts

2. No paid media budget

3. Costs (time and investment) to manage needed to be largely externalised so we didn’t put additional stress on the existing team

Faced with this context, we concluded that SCHF needed a donation platform that would help them stand out. A single-minded, universal cause to be a magnet for donations: something that everybody could identify with.

When we spoke to staff, parents and children a clear commonality emerged, children suffer twice in hospital: firstly, from their afflictions, but secondly from the mental and emotional trauma of being away from family, friends and home comforts.

Homesickness affects over 90% of children in hospital with 50% suffering from severe forms of homesickness.

So, we created a new initiative: ‘Curing Homesickness’ – a campaign to get kids back to where they belong: home.

Homesickness is something we have all felt and we can all identify with. The feeling of hopelessness from being away from home. Research has shown people tend to donate to causes that align with their own experiences, giving our campaign universal appeal.

With a clear ambition and an evocative platform, we came up with a bold idea. We had a loose narrative in our heads about a child in hospital pining for their mum’s pasta sauce. But we wanted it to be far more than just an engaging story. We wanted to turn this sauce into a source of revenue in the real world: by creating a brand synonymous with homesickness.

It would need to be a brand, in and of itself, not just a temporary SKU or rebadging of an existing brand. This is radically different to the pay-to-play system; where brands pay a set fee to charities to rebadge an existing product, exchanging a one-time payment for the social goodwill it provides to the brand.

For it we had a working title: Mum’s Sauce (subsequently changed to Mum’s Sause to mirror a child misspelling).

We approached Australia’s largest supermarket chain, Coles, with the idea. A flagship brand created entirely from scratch. Amazingly, Coles offered to handle the R&D and distribution costs.

Better still, they agreed to donate 50c from every $3 jar, an almost unheard-of proportion at 16.6%.

However, Coles are a national retailer and SCHF is a local brand. To give the brand scale, traction and permanence, Coles asked us to make this an Australia-wide initiative. This required us to engage 7 state-based children hospitals, it was the first time Australian hospitals have joined to raise funds together.

The ‘Curing Homesickness’ became a magnet for other partners, whom came onboard: Assembly Label T-shirts created a ‘Curing Homesickness’ T-shirt, Disney organised special screenings of kids’ films and Pasta Pantry incorporated it into their meals.

Each partner supported the campaign through their owned, earnt and paid channels, including a Coles produced TVC.

1. With zero media spend: 162 million earned media impressions, and $4.6m in donated media: with the backing of Coles, media partners jumped to join.

2. Coles have since expanded the range to 3 different types of pasta sauce. It was the #1 selling sauce for 3 weeks during launch and over a 1.5 million jars sold – and counting.

3. It’s a source of passive income with Coles absorbing NPD/distribution costs so no additional strain on the SCFH team.

4. Coles continues to support the campaign with instore fundraising and promotion, now we have raised over $2 million – and counting.

5. The campaign achieved an ROI of over 300%

The ‘Mum’s’ trademark is registered and owned by SCHF, so we can extend range and lines off it. This is just the beginning.

Now we have a predictable source of revenue in extremely unpredictable times.