Toybox are a small, evangelical charity who do incredible, fearless work for street children in Latin America, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. I’ve worked with them directly for 15 years as a consultant and creative director.
Firstly, I’ve included the 2025 Easter Appeal, which performed brilliantly. I’m just waiting for our client to share the results with me.
Then, DRTV. One of the proudest moments in our relationship has been getting Toybox onto the telly. After years of beating DM controls, our client was able to go to their board of trustees with a case for making theirfirst DRTV ad.My art director and I got in touch with our friends at Eye-to-Eye TV and made it happen. We shot the ad on location in Kenya, got Toybox’s Chief Exec to read the VO (the producer’s recommendation) and asked the audience for £12 a month (a sizeable donation for the medium) to help register street children. The ad was a success and we are looking to test against it again soon – with an updated VO and, I hope, slightly better music..
The VO we are thinking of is Richard Coles, who we used for the radio appeal you can also hear below. This appeal, again for birth registration, was the most successful of the 52 charity appeals BBC Radio 4 ran in the whole of 2016. It brought the charity to the attention of several new donors while raising £61,154.
That appeal in turn, was based on a recruitment letter that has transformed the charity’s income in the past decade. Between 2014-19, this letter has raised £1,031,822. The insert version currently has an ROI of more than 1:1
Finally, the 2020 Easter Appeal, when our strategic solution was to identify six potential asks and bring them together into one mini-catalogue of gifts. The donor could choose which gift they wanted to give to help an outreach worker meet a street children’s immediate needs. The campaign beat its target by more than 300%. It also drew a much higher average gift than projected, with many donors electing to buy all the itemised gifts for children,
I will be updating this page very soon with recent emergency appeals and a conversion pack, both of which showcase long copy. I’m just waiting for art director Simon to leave the pub and send me the files :)
Included for: brand building, entrepreneurial work, fundraising, DRTV, strategy, long copy. DM.
Agency : Rogue Creative