The challenge and opportunity:

Despite the fact that Australians are natural born helpers, out of 28 OECD nations, Australia ranks 17th in per capita contributions to UNICEF even though it ranks 5th in per capita GDP. Australians could have been giving more to UNICEF, but they weren’t.

This was all the more worrying, as donations had never been more needed in the fight against child violence. Every day 8 million children are beaten, every 5 minutes a child is killed by violence, and every minute 17 teenage girls are raped.

Time was not on our side.

But time was also something Australians were very willing to give.

Ever since the financial crisis there had been a fundamental shift in how Australians supported charities. Year on giving cash had been in decline, but giving time was on the up, with Australians giving on average 2.5 hours of volunteer time a week to charitable causes. And whilst Aussies were on average only willing to give $14 in cash, they were willing to give what equated to $75 of their time, based on hourly wages.

The strategy:

To ask first for Australians time, and then turn that time into tangible $AUS.

The campaign:

A MINUTE OF YOUR TIME.

We asked people to give us the value of their time in the form of a monetary donation.

We did this by creating a web donation page - www.aminuteofyourtime.org  -  which invited Australians to find out how much a minute of their time was worth based on their annual salary, which could then be donated directly to UNICEF. Users also had the option to up the number of ‘minutes’ that they wished to donate.

To launch the site, we created a bespoke film as an appeal to Australia featuring the famous singer, Sarah Blasko. We also created OOH ads, made possible by a few generous media owners eager to help a good cause. We also secured a primetime spot on Channel 10’s ‘The Project’ which talked about the issues, and the new giving platform itself.

The results:

The campaign achieved immediate cut-though. This included coverage on one of Australia’s most popular current affairs shows ‘The Project’ which has a total viewership of 519k. Sharing of this online created a further 138K impressions, and through social influencers we reached another 423,130 and engaged a further 21,194.

In total 13,000 minutes were donated. Furthermore for a campaign that only ran for two weeks we managed to achieved 20% of the years’ donation target – which was astounding and unprecedented.

Although the campaign message encouraged people to give just one minute, the campaign resonated so much that people gave far more. If everyone donated one minute the average value of donation would have been expected at $0.61 – we smashed far beyond that with the average donation of $14.

In addition 8% of all donors opted to become full-time donors, which is a figure that far exceeds expected benchmarks for a short-term digital and PR led campaign.