Brief Explanation

The Leukaemia & Blood Cancer Foundation NZ (LBC) needed a way to stay relevant and foster donations outside its annual appeal stunts. Just like every other charity. But for a research charity that relies exclusively on donations, it was becoming a matter of life or death. Our insight came from within the problem itself: With so many asking us to put our hands in our wallets, our immediate reaction is to resist. People are happy to spend money when it’s not their own; so we created a way for people to put their hands in other people’s wallets, every day.

Results and Effectiveness

Finally, there was no excuse to dodge donations! Kiwis loved this priceless way of supporting LBC. The campaign approach worked incredibly well, with many of the formats delivering response rates more than 5 times higher than New Zealand’s November benchmark, proving the strategy worked effectively. The campaign drove over 76,000 site visits over the November site launch period – up 380% on our target! Furthermore, 18,000 Kiwis have made searchforacure.co.nz their homepage creating a consistent stream of donations to help fund blood cancer research and keeping LBC front of mind each and every day.

Creative Execution

People avoid charities, so we had to trick them to get them there. So we adopted a multi-platform approach leveraging online environments that allowed us to be hyper-relevant to a particular audience’s specific interests, trending topics or quirky search queries. Our creative messaging combined ‘weird with relevant’ to cut-through and weaving in an invitation to find out more via searchforacure.co.nz, across Twitter, Facebook, Video Pre-Rolls, Online Audio, Display and of course SEM itself. When the campaign launched in November 2014, it featured over 30 custom audiences with over 100 creative variations served across multiple platforms and hundreds of websites.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Barely anyone thinks about LBC outside its annual “Shave for a Cure” campaign, so finding a way to make it relevant every day was a challenge. We searched for something Kiwis do every day to link with LBC, we didn’t have to look far: Google. More than 63% of Kiwis visit Google every week. So we converted LBC’s homepage to Searchforacure.co.nz – a website which simply featured a Google search bar and two ad units that we could sell to advertisers. The more people we got to use Searchforacure.co.nz to do their Googling, the more revenue we’d generate for LBC.