A hero case study for a charitable Christmas – St Barnabas

Brief

St. Barnabas Hospice’s key Christmas fundraiser, Light Up a Life, lets families honour loved ones by dedicating lights on the Tree of Light at Lincoln Cathedral. A Torchlight Procession follows, ending at the tree, where all lights are lit. Hundreds attend, carrying torches in a moving event.

The main criteria for this campaign were to increase traffic to St Barnabas Hospice’s Dedicate a Light page through emotive storytelling and to see an uplift in ticket sales from the previous year for the Torchlight Procession, resulting in more funds raised for the hospice.

We also aimed to help the hospice engage with the local community and create a buzz around the event through mixed-media PR.

Approach

We took a multi-channel approach to reach new and old audiences. We used a combination of the St Barnbas Google grant account (where Google provides up to $10,000/month in ‘free’ ad spend as St Barnbas is a charity) and Facebook ads.

Our in-house design team created a bank of assets, including a promotional reel featuring actor and television presenter Warwick Davis, who has been a patron of the hospice since 2017. Using a combination of reels, infeed videos, carousels and posters, we launched a £1,200 multi-asset Facebook campaign.

For the campaign’s PR, we sent three press releases to Lincoln and East-Midlands-based press outlets. Once the local press had covered the stories and generated excitement among the Lincoln community, we sent a press invite to select publications in Lincoln, inviting them to participate in the Torchlight Procession and get exclusive interviews, photos, and videos with key members from St Barnabas Hospice. After the event had taken place, a subsequent post-event press release was also sent out to the local press.

Results

This campaign reached 247,913 relevant people in the Lincolnshire area. Our ad creatives helped deliver emotive stories that touched the hearts of many, resulting in 7540 likes, comments, and shares.

In total, the Light Up a Life and Torchlight Procession campaign press releases resulted in twelve pieces of coverage, a radio interview, and four attendees on the night of the Procession. The coverage also resulted in eight backlinks to the St Barnabas Hospice Website.

The Torchlight Procession sold out with an attendance of 1700, a 54% increase from the previous year, raising £63,000 for the hospice which was a 53% increase from the previous year. We had the privilege of attending the Procession with our creative team and captured the breathtaking event on film for future campaigns, concluding the 2023 event.