Client: SickKids Foundation
Product: SickKids Hospital
Title: Family Tree
Media: OMD
Country: Canada
Date Of Campaign: February 16, 2018

Background: SickKids Foundation is the fundraising organization for the Hospital for Sick Children whose mission is to make every kid a healthy kid. The incredible success of last year’s VS campaign created a unique challenge coming into 2018. The campaign was so effective at converting prospects into donors that our actual prospect list was now quite thin. A good problem (but still a problem), requiring a focus on lead generation to refill our potential donor database.Our target was anyone living in the Greater Toronto Area with a propensity to become long-time donors. Our existing donor database gave us few insights beyond traditional segmentation like gender, geography and monetary value. An external list purchase was expensive and likely ineffective in generating leads (list fatigue being the key concern), as these lists are often shared with other fundraisers.

Idea: SickKids is more than a hospital, it’s a family. We know people with a personal connection to SickKids are much more likely to become donors. And caring for each patient creates a ripple-pool effect that touches the lives of so many people beyond just the immediate family involved. So even if you’ve never had a child at the hospital, how do we help people realize they may still share a personal connection with the patients, parents, doctors, staff, and volunteers that make up the SickKids family?Our idea was to create the SickKids Family Tree. By asking people to start (or join) a branch of the tree, we could visualize (and personalize) the incredible reach and impact of just how many people are connected to the hospital. An on-line hub was created to connect everyone who has ever been touched by SickKids. Whether they’ve been patients, known patients, worked on the frontline or simply shared out message they’re part of the SickKids family and they belong on the SickKids Family Tree.We launched on Family Day weekend – a holiday designed to encourage people to spend time with their families - targeting existing donors and asking them to join or start a branch of the SickKids Family Tree. They were also given simple tools to reach out through their social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) to invite family, friends and followers to join their branch of the tree. Family Tree members could track their unique branch in real time and watch their support network expand through a series of stunning data visualizations. In keeping with our goal of generating donor prospects, we did not ask for donations. We simply asked people to show their support by lending their name to the Family Tree. Once they joined, people were given the choice of “opting-in” to receive future SickKids communications.

Results: We were able to generate more than 5x as many new donor leads as originally targeted. • 14,500 individual branches of the Family Tree were started. • Generating 13,974 new email opt-ins. • Helping us surpass our donor prospect goal by more than 550%. • Raised more than $70,000 in donations (even though we did not ask for donations).