A City Without Hunger

The challenge

In 2017, the Ottawa Food Bank decided to launch its first integrated, year-end fundraising campaign to boost donations.  They had strong awareness and digital presence in the market but needed our help to capitalize on it and the attention resulting from community events happening during the holidays.

What we did

After significant insight and strategy work, Blakely created a compelling integrated fundraising campaign thematic: Holiday Food Drive: Fill a plate! and executed against it with a targeted range of mostly digital tactics.

We ran a focused and optimized blend of direct mail, email campaigns, paid social and digital display, donor landing pages, and media partnerships (CBC Project Give and CTV Ottawa).

The final result

The results were pretty remarkable, providing hungry people with healthy emergency food and nourishing prospects for future campaigns: 

• Donations from email and DM tactics grew 9% over the previous year

• Donations from digital media channels grew by an incredible 228% YOY

• Overall, the campaign drove a 30% increase in traffic to the Ottawa Food Bank’s website

• Most importantly, we saw a 28% increase in new donors – creating a foundation for long-term success