Shelter - Multi-Year

Shelter’s Christmas appeal campaign is hugely important to the charity as it can create about 80% of the year’s donations. Prior to working with us Shelter had taken a very traditional approach to their Winter campaign that failed to create distinction and damaged brand recognition. On top of this, their competitors were outspending them 5/1 in media terms which made fundraising even harder. Our first campaign in 2021 took a new, brand response approach and was a huge success, with Shelter receiving their highest ever amount of donations in a single day as a result. Inevitably, this set the bar high for our subsequent campaigns. Christmas is always a very busy time when an abundance of big budget emotional ads are released. We knew we needed to double down on our approach and up the ante to find a new angle and ensure we would cut through in the same way, waking people up from their post-roast comas.

We were faced with a terrifying fact - over 119k children were going to be homeless on Christmas Day in 2022. We developed an overarching concept to work across all of Shelter’s Christmas comms, and launched the appeal with a moving hero film based on lived experience, and depicting the reality of living in temporary accommodation as a child during this time. The film follows 8-year old Jayden, as he spends the day practising his smile. The story sets about making our audience fall in love with our little hero, before revealing the real reason he’s having to put on a brave face…

Unusually for the non-profit sector, ‘Brave Face’ was named in the top UK Christmas Ads list in consumer press (The Guardian and The Sun) alongside big name brands like John Lewis, Boots and Amazon. This put Shelter in front of new audiences through earned media, and paved the way for a record amount of donations.

For 2023, Shelter estimated that there would be over 131,000 children in England waking up in temporary accommodation on Christmas day, an increase of over 10,000 since the previous year and the highest ever recorded. We needed to build on our message from the previous year, whilst ‘exposing’ the hidden homeless crisis in communities across the UK to make the issue really ‘hit home’. This meant reminding people that, without them realising, there could be children in their own towns and communities living in these conditions.

To bring this to life, our Christmas TV advert followed eight-year-old Maddy as she behaves as “good as gold” amongst her neighbours and community, in the hope of being rewarded with the one thing she wants the most for Christmas - a home.