With an ageing donor base and a tiny budget – the challenge was simple but tough: increase awareness amongst our younger audience, with no marketing budget.

A sad irony provided our insight and opportunity: whilst Depaul UK spends its time helping young homeless off the street, many wealthy individuals of the same generation are choosing to sleep on it.

But unlike the young homeless, these young people are there to spend hundreds of pounds on a new gadget. The hype behind the launch of a new Apple product is well known. If we could harness it, we could reach our audience.

The results were outstanding and way surpassed our awareness objectives: getting printed in The Sun: the UK’s biggest selling daily. Online newspapers around the world picked up the stunt, including the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Independent, the Huffington Post. The response on Twitter was phenomenal.

Accumulated earned media totalled £3,768,227, equating to an increase of 5700% in terms of online visibility (Tracking from Pulsar), best of all visits to depauluk.org rose 300%.

Whilst our focus was awareness – we were delighted the spot sold for £570, putting hard cash into the coffers of the charity at a cost of nothing.

At the centre of the campaign was a physical stunt. We occupied a place at the front of the iPhone 6 queue – putting the space up for sale to the highest bidder. The team in charge of the stunt coordinated with those in charge of the social media to maximise the attention from the street and grow the social buzz online.

Once the stunt began, the PR team got to work, driving coverage in national papers and pushing traffic to the eBay page.

One small space in a queue suddenly became national news – reaching a vast audience.

Depaul struggle with an ageing (and ever decreasing) database of donors, so this campaign aimed to specifically target a younger audience (city-dwelling millennials).

They’re digitally savvy and are much more likely to follow the news than brands. We knew we had to find a way of harnessing culture, rather than forcing our way into it.

Armed with this knowledge, we were able to shape our communication and the channels we used to publicise it.