All I want for Christmas is a goat
ActionAid
Issue 42 | March 2017
Agency
Wenderfalck
Creative Team
Creative Director Petter Rudwall Copywriter Daniela Westmark Art Director Greta Rönnmark Creative Didrik Persson
Production Team
PR Anna Hoffman KAM Linn Pétren
Date
December 2016
Background
In December 2015, ActionAid had a huge success with their 'Singing Goats' campaign, which collected over 700 million media impressions and won a lot of awards.
The organisation had centred their campaign around goats because a goat can make several positive changes for women and their families in the developing world.
It could provide nutritious milk to be sold at the local market in order to collect money to buy seeds and finance the children's tuition. Thus not only were women empowered but the whole society.
The challenge was to build on this success for Christmas 2016.
Idea
A hit album for Christmas 2015 had been ActionAid's 'All I Want For Christmas Is A Goat', a collection of Christmas songs sung by goats. Free to download on Spotify, the most requested track was 'Holy Night', viewed over 300,000 times alone on YouTube.
On December 18th, livestreamed on YouTube, the Ambrosia all-female choir came together to sing like goats the top tracks from the album. The Christmas concert for goat lovers was designed to send traffic on to ActionAid's online gift shop where they could buy a 'gift in action'. Instead of buying friends and family a gift they might not want or need, for €30 they could buy them – a goat. They would get a card while a woman in Africa got the goat.
Results
They are still collating the numbers of goats sold but there were over 70 articles, over 16 000 shares on Facebook, over 690 000 streams in ActionAids YouTube channel and over 1 271 000 views on Facebook
Our Thoughts
I don’t know who first came up with this idea of ‘surrogate’ giving, when the present you give someone who has everything actually goes to someone who has nothing, but she or he was a genius. Now every third world charity is trying to sell us goats but few with the panache of this crackers idea. When you hear women baa’ing like goats but rather more beautifully, I defy you not to feel the Christmas spirit steal over you. This is a way of charming people into making a donation and I’m sure was more successful than any bleating appeal for compassion. (Sorry for the pun there.)