There was only one media channel that could act as a powerful and disruptive metaphor to the scale of Australia’s 46,000 young homeless: the payphone.

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.

Our intention was:

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

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

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

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.

It’s easy to ignore 46,000 homeless youth. It’s much harder to ignore 15,391 payphones ringing out at once.

By reaching all 15,391 payphones across Australia at the same time, our phone messages raised $72,000 for Whitelion.

It’s easy to ignore 46,000 homeless youth. It’s hard to ignore 15,391 ringing payphones.

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

We found the vehicle to dramatise this apathy with something that’s been in our peripheral but we simply hadn’t realised it before: 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.

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.

Youth homelessness had become such a huge problem in Australia that it was normal to ignore it.

It had become a silent issue – and was living in the background.

The only way to break the circuit was to make some noise – via an unexpected and powerful audio platform. The payphone.

When 15,391 phone booths rang out loud on the same streets that housed Australia’s young, we were able to tell their story for the first time in context, in a powerfully engaging and emotional way.

The underdog (also known as the “Aussie battler”) trope pervades every aspect of Australian culture. It’s been an intrinsic part of our DNA for much of our young history. When we see the little guy, odds stacked against them, bravely taking on a challenge bigger than themselves, it sparks intense support within us.

Nobody personifies that fighter spirit more so than homeless youth. They’ve been dealt an incredibly bad hand. And yet they still fight. Displaying resilience by removing themselves from the only home they’ve known, in search for safety and stability.

But despite the community inherently supporting “battlers”, they’d convinced themselves homeless youth were anything but an underdog worthy of their support. A longstanding apathy had set in.

We needed to stage a powerful wake-up call that would reframe perceptions, that homeless youth were in fact, the ultimate Aussie battlers.