The scale of loneliness of older people in the UK is vast and deeply saddening, but as Christmas 2016 promised to be even more of a time for escapism than normal, trying to engage people with a shocking truth was more difficult than it had ever been.

Our key insight came from an unlikely source, Josef Stalin, who is quoted as saying: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”.

We needed to make the issue of loneliness relevant to people by making it personal, and bring it so close to home it would be impossible to turn away from.

With no creative agency on board, working with our content creation team, DRUM, we made a film which authentically brought Roy’s story to life. We launched this individual, moving story on the UK’s leading daytime TV show, who dedicated the entire program to loneliness.

To make the issue even more personal, we used the Loneliness Index to create a map to plan and implement our integrated campaign. We were able to pinpoint and distribute Age UK’s message to the areas in most need of volunteer support, right down to the street level.

Plus to drive the issue even closer to home, we used the Loneliness Index data to deliver bespoke local messaging with live statistics revealing how many lonely older people were in vicinity of that advert, across digital display, social media, video and out of home.

By telling a story that everyone could relate to, and using real world data to make it personally relevant, we successfully moved the cause of elderly loneliness closer to home.

An incredible 33,000 people signed up to volunteer for Age UK’s Call in Time service, more than twelve times the number of calls they receive in a whole year (delivered in just 4 weeks).

This campaign alone will end 2 million hours of lonely silence for older people across the UK in 2017.

Online donations increased 4% YOY, a significant result given the success of the previous Christmas’s John Lewis partnership.

And importantly, Age UK had 245% more lonely elderly people sign up to receive the Call in Time service than the previous year. This really is testament to our faithful depiction of loneliness, and granular targeting of our campaign to the areas where help was needed the most.