Evelina’s Incredibles

Background

Evelina London Children’s Charity exists to support Evelina London Children’s Hospital, the fastest-growing children’s hospital in the UK. The hospital opened in its current location in 2005 and now cares for more than 104,000 children and young people each year.

The brief

Evelina London invited us to pitch to develop a new Christmas campaign to help elevate their brand awareness and, in turn, deliver on their ambitious four-year income target.

They came to us wanting a new strategy and proposition to target the whole of the UK public. Historically their campaigns have been London-centric with the ask to support the hospital staff, riding off the back of the covid NHS strategy. We wanted the new proposition and ask to have the children at the heart of the campaign.

This year’s campaign will take a test and learn approach and there are huge aspirations for how this Christmas firework moment can grow over time. The ambition is that this will be their flagship fundraising campaign and position them as the charity of choice at Christmas time in South London and the surrounding areas – where the hospital is based.

The work

We started by reviewing all their internal data, identifying opportunity areas and target audiences. From this, we created a messaging hierarchy for those groups.

In the pitch we had presented a concept and creative that the team loved and had already decided to progress with, so we worked with them to refine the idea and ‘Evelina’s Incredibles’ was born.

‘Evelina’s Incredibles’ is a distinct and impactful fundraising campaign with its own look and feel, design elements, and language. It positions children and the difference the charity can make for each and every child, at the heart of everything.

Our brief was to position real-life case studies throughout the campaign. We developed creative concepts and directed a photoshoot with a selection of case studies at the Evelina London hospital. We used these to demonstrate the impact on children through authentic storytelling and images of their everyday incredible moments in the hospital and with staff.

We supported on the strategic delivery of the campaign, including forecasting, target setting and ideas around product development. We also supported on the media strategy to ensure a fully integrated campaign that would achieve maximum impact with our target audiences.

A range of assets were developed to support the campaign, ranging from a DM pack to digital assets, OOH ads to a key messaging document.

We also worked with our TV production partner, to develop Evelina London’s first-ever TV ad. This needed to integrate with the rest of the marketing assets so in the ad we brought to life Cruz’s story, showing him reflecting on his time in hospital, featuring real-life clips of the incredible care given by staff at Evelina London.

We supported across every step of this process, from storyboarding the initial concept, scripting, filming with Cruz, recording the VO, animation, design and music, to editing, post-production and delivering to AdSmart.

The campaign smashed its targets and Year 2 is currently in planning stage.