UK charities are suffering. Donations are down 20% and government funding is down 60%.

The Pilion Trust is tiny. The cuts meant their shelter for young homeless kids was about to close. We needed to raise £50,000 to keep it open.

They have a very small core of loyal supporters. But to raise this amount of money we needed to speak to a much bigger audience.

The Pilion Trust didn’t have the money for big budget ad’ campaigns, so we needed an attention grabbing way of raising money and awareness that wouldn’t cost the earth.

The Pilion Trust needed to raise money fast. Our social experiment was designed to show people that good intentions alone are not enough. That charities need money to survive.

With The Pilion Trust’s shelter about to close we needed an idea that would reach a lot of people very quickly. We created a deliberately provocative idea, designed not only to be shared, but also to be written about by journalists.

And because The Pilion Trust had very little money, they needed an extremely low cost idea. The campaign cost just £500 pounds (and a lot of hard work of course).

To stop the shelter from closing, we needed to raise £50,000.

As there was no money for traditional media we knew we had to leverage social media to have any hope of succeeding.

With only a £500 budget, we decided to create a highly shareable, newsworthy film asking the world for donations.

We created a database of influencers and launched the film via Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

The film was an instant hit. But we knew that this wasn’t enough. We worked with volunteers from a local youth club around the clock to convert positive comments and sharing into donation.

To date the film has been watched over 3.6 million times.

The Pilion Trust received £163,734 in donations, over three times the £50,000 target. Year to date donations are up 1,623% and still rising. This represents a 32,647% ROI.

There has been a 572% rise in people signing up to give on a monthly basis, representing a huge increase in long term relationships with the brand.

To date the campaign has generated 255 million media impressions equating to £8.3 million in earned media.

But most of all it meant that the shelter for homeless kids didn’t have to close.