Action for Children

Driving impact amidst unprecedented times

With the cost-of-living Crisis raging, the work Action for Children does to help children and families experiencing poverty has never been more valuable. However, with pressures on charitable giving, the competition at Christmas was unprecedented.

Since 2018, Secret Santa has been Action for Children’s flagship Christmas fundraising campaign. For 2022 we had big ambitions to continue the campaign’s growth, drive awareness and increase donations to help support the brilliant work Action for Children does.

What we did

Using Action for Children’s new creative, developed by Killer Creative, we planned and placed the new ads in an ambitious paid media strategy.

What we did

At the heart of the campaign was a Christmas TV advert voiced by Larry Lamb, and the story ran as a thread through our paid digital, direct mail, organic social media and email.

What we did

Extensive testing was done on paid digital media in the run-up to the ad’s launch across PPC, Facebook, Instagram, Display and YouTube. We tested a paid TikTok campaign for the first time ever to drive engagement.

To drive awareness of child poverty at Christmas, we launched a national news story leveraging Earned media, revealing the struggles of working parents unable to afford celebrations.

What we did

Lastly, a brilliant partnership with John Lewis saw Action for Children’s logo featured at the end of their 2022 Christmas advert. Whilst this was a separate activation, we took advantage to maximise impact and build on any awareness that activation built through our ads. The Telegraph also chose Action for Children as a charity partner for its Christmas Charity Appeal, showcasing our incredible work in print and online.

By aligning all available touchpoints, we created a snowball effect for engagement, seeing our overall campaign impressions boosted beyond our target of 160 million to deliver a staggering 400 million impressions, maximising our visibility at a key time of year for fundraising.

We didn’t just maintain – we saw a 24% increase in prompted brand awareness from pre-campaign to post-campaign. This uplift is more than any other children’s charity achieved during the same period. The campaign has raised over £1.7 million (including Gift Aid), which is a 146% increase year on year, including The Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal, which raised over £125,000.

+24
Increase in brand awareness
1.7
Million raised
400
Million 1mpressions