Background

In 2015 we achieved something that has never been achieved in Age UK’s history – we made loneliness a cultural issue. We achieved this through the ground-breaking partnership between Age UK & John Lewis and their Christmas campaign ‘Man on the Moon’. However 2016 looked very different...and daunting as we didn’t have one of the largest cultural moments at Christmas to piggy back on.

Scale of the task

It is hard to get any charitable cause on the agenda, but we were also one of the smallest spenders in the category. Spend in the sector had increased 14%, but with less than half the budget of other charities, we had just 3% SOV.

Not only that but the main objective was tougher – to get people to act, not just care - by getting them to sign up to Age UK’s Call In Time service.

Success

Despite all of this we helped Age UK generate the largest number of volunteers the charity had ever seen and took another giant step towards alleviating loneliness in older people all across the UK.

So how did we do it?

We used the Power of One real person’s story. One story which we elevated into a moving piece of dramatic content and captured the plight of the one million lonely people in the UK. Building a campaign around this content with the smart use of data, delivering our loneliness message via OOH, digital, FB, Spotify and Age UK’s owned channels, we moved the nation to act.