We reached vloggers in the ‘real world’ by searching their vlogs for personal data, so one received pack at his theatre group, another at his gig, another from a return address when we bought his belt off eBay.7 of the 12 vloggers opened their DM live, challenged their viewers, attended our ‘Gathering’ at HQ and turned our campaign into a movement.Their films attracted nearly 1,000,000 views, 4,000 texts, 150 videos; featured twice by YouTube editors and ranked ‘Top 10 most-viewed this month’ in UK/France/Germany/Poland/Russia/Australia/Canada.We talked to 12 people ... and reached 11% of 5-20 year olds in Britain.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution is a charity that saves lives at sea. Its donors are old, getting older. Sadly, it has the lowest awareness among the youth of any British charity. Looking 10 years ahead to recruiting donors of tomorrow, we ran some research which told us: 1. The younger you’re aware of a charity, the more likely you are to donate when you’re older. 2. The majority of kids care more about being demonised by the media as a generation of “dumbed-down, game-numbed, knife-wielding hoodies than sea rescue." How could we win their hearts now?

It started as a campaign but has become a movement - by the youth, for the youth, about the youth, committed to rewriting the way the media stereotypes them. How? We sent 12 subversive ‘mystery packages’ to Britain’s 12 most popular vloggers to open live, challenging their viewers to post videos and texts about who they really are. Huge response was followed by huge intrigue, as they asked who we are?! Having captured the attention of hundreds of thousands, we invited the vloggers to a ‘Gathering’ at our HQ to find out. And the films they made were more powerful than any campaign could be.

We needed to win the hearts of the youth as donors of tomorrow so we sought a higher purpose than sea rescue. We discovered our relevance to them not in our service, but in our values ... values that are part of the ‘character’ of an island nation; values the media accuses their generation of betraying; values they aspire to now more than ever as they take on the mantle of a world ravaged by war, recession and environment destruction. Who better to champion the youth than a brand with the ultimate reason to believe in them? After all, we have 470 volunteers, 16-22, who risk their lives at sea to save the lives of others.