In Romania there is no dedicated hospital for treating children with cancer.

That means the chances of survival are 50% smaller than in other European countries.

The everyday experience for these children includes long ambulance rides to the other end of the city to get radiotherapy, waiting lines to use a shower or toilet and overcrowded hospital rooms.

In an unprecedented effort, our client, the Give Life Foundation decided to build the first hospital in the country for cancer sick children, all founded by people, without any support from the state institutions.

Our brief was to address a millennial audience and make them donate for this mammoth task the objective of the campaign was to raise 500k euros for the hospital.

Our idea was to transform the sad story of these children into a story that our audience can easily relate to. So we transformed their story into an Instagram story.

With no budget we contacted various local influencers, and asked them to place a fake thread of hair on the stories they regularly post on Instagram. The thread of hair looked so real that everyone instinctively wanted to remove it with their finger. This triggered the swipe option of the Instagram Story and directed the users to an unexpected message — A thread of hair on your screen does not matter. But when life hangs by a thread of hair it does matter and we cannot stand aside. Let’s build the first hospital for children with cancer. Donate.

The donate button made the donation very easy and simple sending the users to the SMS app of their smartphones.

When addressing our target audience of millennials we decided to use a thread of hair as the symbol for the story of cancer sick children. Hair loss is a common known effect of the disease and we gave it a twist to disrupt the digital experience of our audience.

In a digital environment overcrowded with social cause requests, where users just swipe to move on, ignoring these causes, we decided to use the same swipe action to make a difference.

This translated in a change of digital behavior for our target audience that made our campaign more visible and engaging than any other social message.

We contacted 9 of the most influential KOLs. Names from music, entertainment, vlogging etc. They sent us the stories they wanted to post and we added the fake thread of hair in the most realistic manner and they posted the stories “designed” with the fake thread of hair. These stories included common Instagram visuals such as blue skies, cappuccinos, travel photos etc.

Over a period of one month an addition of 30 influencers have voluntarily joined our campaign

The audience of these influencers where exposed to these Instagram stories, trying to remove the fake thread of hair and discovering our message.

Our campaign had a total reach of over 9 million people with over 10 million social mentions

throughout various digital channels.

The total SMS donations surpassed 1 million euros, double than the projected target.