Capturing The Magic of Childhood for a Serious Cause

Canuck Place Children’s Hospice provides pediatric palliative care to families across British Columbia. While there’s no question that everyone can see the value in providing support for children living with life threatening illnesses and their families, it’s not always an easy topic to talk about.

Canuck Place partnered with Capulet for one of our first Remarkables Labs. With this collaboration, there were two issues that Canuck Place was hoping to tackle: connecting with new, younger donors and clarifying the Canuck Place brand in the community.

To reach these goals, we needed to uncover a new approach to connecting with the public that enabled Canuck Place to talk about their work.

The Remarkables Lab Difference

Through Remarkables Labs, we work with the organization’s in-house team to enable to skills of existing staff and train them through the process of creating a successful creative campaign from start to finish.  This serves the double purpose of designing a great new campaign to serve the business goals of the organization, while also training up their staff to create effective campaigns in-house in the future.

The Best Day Ever

In collaboration with the staff at Canuck Place, we devised the Best Day Ever Campaign. For this campaign, there was a month long digital campaign where donors could pledge their support for a child in Canuck Place’s care to have a “Day without Pain”. And to capture the imagination of potential donors and the public at large, the campaign was celebrated by building a giant 2,000 sq ft blanket fort at the TELUS Gardens in Downtown Vancouver.   

The Best Campaign Ever

The Best Day Ever campaign was a huge success. The Blanket Fort really high engagement, and allowed the public to engage with Canuck Place in a way that connected with the magic of childhood. The Best Day Ever campaign saw some pretty incredible marketing and fundraising milestones:

• The campaign exceeded Canuck Place’s fundraising goals by 45%.
• The online campaign brought in $14,500 in donations, 20% of which were from new donors.
• $34,500 additional dollars were raised through direct mail and fundraising by school groups.
• Web traffic for Canuck Place doubled for the month of the campaign (over the same month of the previous year).
• Canuck Place was able to collect 200 new email addresses.
• Canuck Place won Best Donor Acquisition at the Non-Profit Innovation & Optimization Awards.
• Feedback from both attendees and media was incredibly positive and shed a new light on the way the public views Canuck Place.

The success of this campaign was a direct result of engaging the staff in a creative way and enabling their talents through the Remarkables Lab process. The idea to create a giant blanket fort came from activities that children are already doing at Canuck Place, so bringing the public into this world that they could also relate to their own childhoods created some true engagement magic.