Over 400 kids are treated at SickKids over the holidays. To lift their spirits, the hospital tasked us with raising enough revenue to help provide gifts and activities for each and every patient. They set an aggressive fundraising goal to ensure that holidays at SickKids hospital felt more like holidays at home.

Against the backdrop of holiday busyness and a dwindling donor pool, we needed people to remember SickKids patients and maintain year-over-year campaign revenue at $1.2M. This case demonstrates how we leveraged an integrated plan to raise an impressive amount of funding for SickKids Hospital and, more importantly, the spirits of every kid

While most kids begin to worry about The Naughty and Nice List around the holidays, SickKids patients are busy worrying about much more. This year, we let Santa cover the naughty and nice, and asked consumers to take care of the brave. The Brave List is a new holiday list made to recognize their courage. Every SickKids patient, new and old, earns their place the moment they walk through the hospital doors. The Brave List, through every media touch

Our target audience was adults in the Greater Toronto Area that typically donate to charities around the holidays. However, with 70% of Canadians saying they planned to donate less during the holidays season and only 51% planning to donate at all, inspiring Torontonians to add another gift to their list to help us raise $1.2M for SickKids patients was ambitious.

To reach them, we leveraged our creative insight to reframe the naughty or nice list by showcasing that at SickKids this Christmas, there was only the brave list – and every patient’s name was on it.

A list that celebrates their bravery while giving the public a tangible call-to-action: This year, Santa takes care of the naughty and nice, help us support The Brave.

To bring this to life, we created an ever-growing list of patients’ names who have graced the halls of SickKids during the holiday season. Using SickKids’ social channels to invite patients to be included, we garnered over 400 names to be showcased on The Brave List.

Hitting our fundraising goal and ensuring maximum reach of the list required an integrated strategy spanning awareness to conversion to maximize donations.

Key elements of our execution at the awareness level included film and a one-of-a-kind projection of The Brave List in Toronto’s Christmas Market, where market-goers could also donate when purchasing their admission ticket. Alongside the stunt, we developed a fully-integrated channel plan utilizing 60- and 30-second videos to describe what the list was all about, digital and social posts, print ads, emails, and a physical catalog to ultimately drive conversion.

The campaign ran from November 18, 2021 to December 30, 2021.

Amidst the chaos of Covid, 70% of Canadians said they planned to donate less over the holidays.

Nonetheless, we managed to raise $1.2M in just thirty-three days that involved 8.9K gift purchases and surpassing our 5-year average by 64%.

Most importantly, our campaign instilled a sense of pride and recognition for over 400 SickKids patients who were able to see their names appear on our Brave List – “Seeing [our daughter’s] eyes light up and the expression on her face after seeing her name on the Brave List will be engraved in our hearts and cherished forever.” - Mother of Elena K, SickKids Patient.