Too many young Aussies are living on the streets. 46,000 of them.

It’s a ridiculous number.

Whitelion is a small Australian charity that gets young Aussies out of unstable housing and into jobs.

But appealing to everyday individuals to donate isn’t easy when it comes to at-risk youth. Because so many see this vulnerable group as kids who do drugs and hate hard work.

The misconception is rife throughout the entire category and is the overall barrier to donations from the public.

We know this couldn’t be farther from reality. At-risk youth possess incredible strength. They have the resilience to pull themselves from horrific domestic situations.

We needed to peel away misconceptions that have long been building towards at-risk youth; using a disruptive way to educate.

Our objectives were:

1. Demonstrate and raise awareness of the scale of at-risk youth.

2. Raise donations with a limited budget of $3,775.

The Loudest Call:

Whitelion showed Australia the scale of youth homelessness by making the country aware of something else that’s just as invisible as the young on our streets: the payphone.

We were going to reignite the use of payphones, make them seen and heard once more, as a metaphorical way to shed light on the comparable apathy developed towards homeless youth.

On a single day, at a single time, a young survivor from Whitelion was going to “call” every single payphone in Australia - all 15,391 of them - and share their story.

It was clear that ignoring over 46,000 homeless youth had become relatively easy. What’s impossible to ignore is 15,391 payphones all ringing at once.

It was quite literally the LOUDEST call for help staged by a charity.

Without a media buy, our targeting abilities were significantly hindered. So, we had to figure out a way to reach EVERYONE.

Our strategy was to dramatise the apathy that everyday Australians hold towards at-risk youth.

We found the vehicle to dramatise this apathy: public payphones.

Public payphone are everywhere, but we completely ignore them. Because we no longer see the value in them.

Making these payphones seen and heard once more was a metaphorical way to shed light on other aspects of our community that we’ve grown apathetic towards.

The Loudest Call is a challenge to everyday Australians – to finally hear and see the 46,000 at-risk youth worthy of support.

Once a person picked up the call, they would hear our youth’s story, and at the end, they were directed to a bespoke campaign page to submit their donation.

Helping a young homeless Aussie call 15,391 payphones seemed easy. At least to start with.

The first challenge was getting 15,391 payphone numbers.

At first we thought we’d have to walk to every payphone to find their numbers. But thanks to an obscure Australian law, every payphone in Australia must have a publicly available number.

Then there were the Australian spam laws. Which we found out don’t apply to public phones. Lucky.

Actually making a phone message from young homeless Aussies was straight forward. Apart from testing the volume - which we found is compressed by the phone company. After a bit of experimentation in the field we got the volume right.

Then there was automation. Which was more complicated than we imagined. But thanks to some smart people we were able to figure out how to legally call 15,391 payphones in Australia without getting kicked off the network.

1. Demonstrate and raise awareness of the scale of at-risk youth.

2. Raise donations with a limited budget of $3775.

AWARENESS:

There’s never been something like this staged by another charity or brand. So, there was literally no benchmark to be able to compare ourselves to. Although, given that we were dealing with a legacy technology that most people no longer utilise (less than 2% of Australians even opt to use public payphones for emergency assistance), we achieved an average pickup rate of over 19%. An incredible result.

While the average listen rate was 9.7 seconds, there were up to 750 calls that were listened to for more than 59 seconds – that’s the entire duration of our message.

DONATIONS:

The call to action for The Loudest Call was to head to whitelion.org.au to make a donation.

With a tiny $3775 production budget, the campaign raised an incredible $76000.