A tiny charity, with an even tinier budget, using a technological world first to hijack some of the most iconic London Christmas lights with a child’s heartbeat is quite a story. And one that child heart charity, Tiny Tickers, successfully created against the odds to cut-through the festive consumerism and promote donations to child heart patients; who miss out on the magic of Christmas.

“Twinkle Twinkle Little Heart” was an innovative PR stunt covered in 31 countries, doubling charity donations, driving a 365% increase in charity web traffic and achieving a 492% increase in positive sentiment for Tiny Tickers.

The modern Christmas story is one of consumerism. What is the perfect present to buy? What will we receive? In contrast, all young heart patients want for Christmas is more time.

Tiny Tickers is a small charity that supports these babies and children – with the festive period a key time to raise awareness of their plight, and donations for vital medical support equipment in the year ahead.

But with the cultural conversation in December dominated by festive shopping, the plight of child heart patients gets lost. And thus, so do donations.

Our brief was to change this – cutting through the noise around festive consumerism to tell their story and raise money.

Objectives:

- Increase December donation levels by 20% (against 2017)

- Increase mainstream public awareness of Tiny Tickers and the plight of child heart patients (UK & internationally)

- Increase December web traffic by 40% (against 2017)

Twinkle Twinkle Little Heart…In the last shopping week before Christmas day, we connected the heart monitor of Billy; a 2-year old heart patient, to the iconic Christmas lights of London’s famous shopping district - Seven Dials (known as the ‘heart’ of the West End).

From hundreds of miles away, his live heartbeat controlled the pulsing of lights via specially-designed technology - creating an emotive spectacle across 4 kilometers of cabling and 12,672 LEDs as the historic lights pulsed for the first time in their history. While the spectacle disrupted people’s shopping trips, our content and resulting coverage story spread around the globe; transcended language barriers with our message.

We had realized that our challenge of festive consumerism also presented opportunities: 1) foot traffic in shopping areas increases, accompanied by media attention and 2) the public are already in ‘gift buying’ mode, so a donation could be positioned as buying a child patient ‘the gift of time’.

Our strategy? Hijack the heart of London’s Christmas shopping (and news coverage) with a visual stunt that transcended language barriers and engaged UK and global general public 18 – 65 with the message that child heart patients miss the Christmas magic we take for granted. And call for giving the ‘gift of time’ via a donation.

By giving the media another angle to take on the huge news theme of Christmas shopping they love covering, we knew the resulting story and visuals would land heavily as a counterpoint to the coverage of festive consumerism. A tale with a little festive heart.

Billy’s heartbeat controlled the Seven Dials Christmas lights 20 – 24 December, with digital displays on-location targeting passing shoppers. Content creation focused on delivering the visual spectacle; designed to transcend language barriers in coverage:

- We shot a short social film telling Billy’s story and introducing the stunt. At launch, this was distributed to high value UK & international broadcast, online and print media with the press release, stills and interview opportunities with Billy’s mum.

- Simultaneously, the film was organically seeded across Facebook and high sharing online communities, with an emphasis on targeting new parents.

- UK & international media film crews covered the spectacle on the ground.

- Embeds of charity weblinks were negotiated with high traffic online media to organically boost traffic and SEO performance.

- We organically targeting the popular #sevendials social hashtags to direct general interest in the lights towards Twinkle Twinkle Little Heart.

Tier 1:

- 438 PIECES OF MEDIA COVERAGE for Twinkle Twinkle Little Heart globally including high quality placements on prime time TV news, national print front pages and full page spreads in key country media.

- 31 COUNTRIES. The story went global with coverage and conversation in 31 countries. Including the US, Germany, Italy and Thailand.

- OTS of 173.9m

- 100% of coverage was positive in tone.

- 95% of coverage contained complete message delivery.

- 1million + video views, no paid budget

- 500,000+ people saw the stunt spectacle in person

Tier 2:

- DOUBLED Christmas campaign donations YOY, with fundraising coming from around the globe for the first time ever.

- 365% WEB TRAFFIC INCREASE to Tiny Tickers in the campaign period (YoY).

- 560% increase in positive emotions linked to Tiny Tickers (e.g. great, amazing, love, good, wonderful, happy. lovely, hope etc) – in news and social coverage:

YoY comparison – Dec 11th 2017 to Jan 15th 2018 vs Dec 11th 2018 to Jan 15th 2019.

- 492% increase in positive sentiment towards Tiny Tickers in news and social coverage, Global YoY comparison –Dec 11th 2017 to Jan 15th 2018 vs Dec 11th 2018 to Jan 15th 2019