Whitelion Youth
Client: Whitelion Youth
Product: Whitelion Youth
Title: The Loudest Call
Media: Payphone, Website.
Country: Australia
Date Of Campaign: 8th November, 2022
Background: Too many young Aussies are living on the streets. 46,000 of them. It’s a ridiculous number. Whitelion is a small Australian charity that gets young Aussies out of unstable housing and into jobs. But appealing to everyday individuals to donate isn’t easy when it comes to at-risk youth. Because so many see this vulnerable group as kids who do drugs and hate hard work. The misconception is rife throughout the entire category and is the overall barrier to donations from the public. We know this couldn’t be farther from reality. At-risk youth possess incredible strength. They have the resilience to pull themselves from horrific domestic situations. Our objectives were: 1. Demonstrate and raise awareness of the scale of at-risk youth. 2. Raise donations with a limited budget of $3,775. In order to peel away misconceptions that have long been building towards at-risk youth, we needed to turn up in an unexpected way but at an expected place when it comes to homelessness, every street corner and educate every day Australians.
Idea: The Loudest Call: Whitelion showed Australia the scale of youth homelessness by making the country aware of something else that’s just as invisible as the young on our streets: the payphone. It’s easy to ignore 46,000 homeless youth. It’s much harder to ignore 15,391 payphones ringing out at once. By reaching all 15,391 payphones across Australia at the same time, our phone messages raised $72,000 for Whitelion. It’s easy to ignore 46,000 homeless youth. It’s hard to ignore 15,391 ringing payphones.
Results: Our objectives were: 1. Demonstrate and raise awareness of the scale of at-risk youth. 2. Raise donations with a limited budget of $3,775. AWARENESS: There’s never been something like this staged by another charity or brand. So, there was literally no benchmark to be able to compare ourselves to. Although, given that we were dealing with a legacy technology that most people no longer utilise (less than 2% of Australians even opt to use public payphones for emergency assistance), we achieved an average pickup rate of over 19%. An incredible result. While the average listen rate was 9.7 seconds, there were up to 750 calls that were listened to for more than 59 seconds – that’s the entire duration of our message. DONATIONS: The call to action for The Loudest Call was to head to whitelion.org.au to make a donation. For a budget of just $3,775, we managed to generate $76,370 in campaign donations!
