For some, human connection is a meaningful chat with friends. For others, it’s their livelihood. 2020 saw a 40% reduction in high street footfall which devastated our charity partner The Big Issue. Their vendors rely on the generosity of passers-by to alleviate poverty. Virgin Media's purpose is building connections that really matter – how could we help vendors to reconnect with lost customers?

At a time when people couldn’t get to the high street we brought the high street to them. We recreated the face-to-face connections Big Issue vendors rely on in a place where people were managing to connect –?social media. Our Digital High Street brought the smiles and stories of vendors online, allowing virtual passers-by to look vendors in the eye, hear their experiences and donate directly.

With less opportunities to get out of the house, UK adults were spending more than ¼ of their day online – the highest on record. Maximising The Big Issue’s online presence would be key to raising awareness and donations.

Studies of donor behaviour show people are more willing to give to individuals with names and faces than to an anonymous group – the identifiable victim effect. Leveraging this, we gave vendors a platform to reconnect with potential donors.

We handed our official Virgin Media Twitter account over to The Big Issue. Working with them to repurpose our feed we created a Digital High Street,?where our 300,000+ followers could?‘meet’?individual vendors. A place for those vendors to tell personal stories of the most challenging year they had been through.?

There was a special focus on giving people the opportunity to find their local vendor and subscribe directly to them.?

By creating a ‘Digital High Street’ we gave prospective Big Issue customers a place they could still come face to face with vendors. We handed our Twitter account over to real Big Issue vendors, repurposing our cover image, bio, profile picture and feed to create a place where they could reconnect with the customers, and the sales, they were sorely missing. There was a Twitter Spotlight pushing to our feed and a sponsored hashtag to help as many people as possible #RememberBigIssue.

For 24 hours we posted no Virgin Media content, letting the Big Issue sellers tell their stories of one of the most challenging years many of them have been through. The whole day was punctuated by multiple calls to action to donate and subscribe. The pinned tweet, under which all the images and stories

We achieved over 25M impressions in 24 hours, and drove double the volume of monthly traffic to the Big Issue’s donation page - in a single day.

Even though we went live during the busiest shopping and donating period of the year our customers dug deep and the number of online donations increased by an incredible 79%.

Through the use of the ‘Find your local vendor’ functionality we successfully re-connected customers with their local Big Issue vendors and generated a 320% increase in the number of direct magazine subscriptions sold.