Sponsor a child
Issue 11 | July 2009
Agency
iris, London
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Shaun McIlrath
Date
March 2009
Background
Kids Company provides vulnerable inner-city kids with emotional and educational support. The Sponsor A Child initiative was targeted specifically at over 500 social responsibility professionals, including HR directors and the like, within more than 355 corporations, specifically in the banking, fashion and media industries.
The intention was that the piece would encourage prospects to take a phone call explaining how their organisations could help turn young lives around.
Idea
The recipients would be used to scanning CV’s on a regular basis but inside the envelope, marked ‘Personal documents enclosed’ on the outside they would find a CV of a life gone terribly wrong. Turn the CV over, however, and they would see the same life but now full of achievement.
To make the deliberately ‘under-designed’ piece relevant to the recipient, iris created different character profiles and tailored the CV’s for each industry.
The agency also uploaded the CV’s to online recruitment sites such as Monster.com, and created pro?les on social networking sites such as Linked-in, inviting other potential employers to sponsor a child and turn a life around.
Results
The CV’s cost pennies to make but have pulled in, on average, £5,000 per CV. This has helped 81% of young people cared for by Kids Company to reintegrate into education, training or employment. 94% have been able to reduce substance misuse and 89% move away from a life of crime.
Our Thoughts
Imagination isn’t just the ability to dream up ideas but the ability to imagine who you’re addressing and what they might be doing when you get to talk to them. This has imagination in abundance even though it might look dull. That’s deliberate. The team imagined an HR director flicking opening the mail; they imagined her flicking through yet another CV, the thousandth of the week. They imagined how her attention would suddenly be captured. They imagined what she might say when she got a phone-call from Kids Company and they imagined into reality £250,000 of donations.