Toybox are a small, evangelical charity who do incredible, fearless work for street children in Latin America. I’ve worked with them directly for over a decade as a consultant and creative director. My art director and I currently do all their creative and strategy work, acting as a de facto full-service agency.
One of the proudest moments in our relationship has been getting Toybox onto TV. After years of beating DM controls, our client was able to go to their board of trustees with a case for making their first 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 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.
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 has an ROI of more than 1:1
Finally, also included is their 2020 Easter Appeal. Here, we offered donors a mini-catalogue of gifts that they could buy for street children. The plan was that donors, once engaged, would buy more than one gift (perhaps all of them) to help increase the average gift – something vital for a charity with a relatively small donor base.
The pack beat this target by more than 300% – raising £110,000 in total with a much higher average gift than projected, with many donors electing to buy all the itemised gifts for children.
The following year, this approach improved on these results even further, raising more than £150,000.
Included for: brand building, entrepreneurial work, fundraising, DRTV, strategy, long copy. DM.
Agency : Rogue Creative