Share your parents

Background

Music For Life, the annual charity event organized by radio station Studio Brussels and the Red Cross, this year was all about the 15 million orphans born to parents with AIDS.

The objective of the campaign was to create awareness of the problem and collect money to support the orphans from both parents and from their children, who are, after all, the most sensible target group when it comes to issues like this.

Idea

In Belgium, kids have pretty much everything they need. So they were asked to give some of the attention and stuff they get from their parents to the orphans. Including their parents.

Results

140,000 school agenda stickers were distributed by the Belgian government. These could be put in school-books in the places where parents are supposed to sign off homework.

1,200 children promoted their parents online.

Media coverage was valued at 3.5m euros and the plight of African orphans was the talk of the town from the 1^st until the 25^th of December. Belgian children and their parents raised 5,020,000 euro for the cause, the largest amount since the beginning of the of Music for Life initiative.

Our Thoughts

It isn’t easy to do pro-bono work. Or, rather, it isn’t any easier than coming up with ideas for a bank or for an insurance group. But it is often easier to sell, because the people who run charities know they are getting top-dollar thinking at bottom-dollar prices. For agencies, the rewards of doing a campaign like this are in feeling their talents can be put to good use. But also that their talents are appreciated and used properly.

This is how small agencies get big, because smart marketers see how they are able to part people from their money for a cause and wonder if the same can’t be done for their own brands and products.