Strike a Match

The initial rollout included a number of components. As a digitally focused campaign — there is no direct-mail component specifically for Buy a Kid Some Time — it incorporated a series of six to seven e-mails, a video, a dedicated microsite and other media ads. And as part of the “buy a kid some time” theme, donors were taken to a mini-catalog for donations, where they could donate, for instance, X amount of dollars for 15 minutes, the equivalent of an average call. Different amounts of time — at different price points — meant different services KHP could provide to kids in need.

Thanks to generous corporate support, KHP was able to extend its reach beyond its e-mail file and event donors with billboards throughout Toronto, a full-page ad in the Globe and Mail, display ads, Google advertising and corporate matching gifts.

“This was a brand-new campaign in 2009 with Stephen Thomas, and we were pretty excited about it,” MacLean says. “It was successful, so we decided to invest a little more in 2010, and we’ve done different things over the years … a lot of things to put it top of mind.”

In the first two years of the campaign, KHP and Stephen Thomas did a lot testing with its e-mails, testing subject lines, copy length, hard-hitting messages vs. softer messaging, featuring dollar amounts for the ask vs. not. And with the campaign winning a 2010 Direct Marketing Association International ECHO Award, the gleanings from those early tests drove the direction of the campaign for future years.

The adjustments
After sending six to seven e-mails for the campaign in 2009 and 2010 to anywhere from 50,000 to upward of 75,000 e-mail addresses, KHP began to scale back on budgeting for the campaign. Due to myriad factors, including continued economic instability and KHP’s lack of government funding, it could not invest as much in the campaign as it did in the early years.