The Context

Shelter’s Christmas appeal campaign is hugely important to the charity as it can create about 80% of the year’s donations. Prior to working with us Shelter had taken a very traditional approach to their Winter campaign that failed to create distinction and damaged brand recognition. On top of this, their competitors were outspending them 5/1 in media terms which made fundraising even harder.

Year 1 - The Drive

We needed to raise funds for the hundreds of thousands of people spending Christmas without a home, instead living in temporary accommodation, sofa-surfing or sleeping rough. With the pandemic reinforcing to many of us the importance of spending Christmas at home with loved ones, we were able to create something that was deeply moving and still relatable.

Our first campaign in 2021 took a new, brand response approach and was a huge success. We created an emotive film that subverted the typical “us and them” narrative, instead capturing the raw reality of being homeless at Christmas, based on genuine stories. Inevitably, this set the bar high for our subsequent campaigns.

Christmas is always a very busy time when an abundance of big budget emotional ads are released. We knew we needed to double down on our approach and up the ante to find a new angle and ensure we would cut through in the same way, waking people up from their post-roast comas.

Year 2 - Brave Face

We were faced with a terrifying fact - over 119k children were going to be homeless on Christmas Day in 2022. We developed an overarching concept to work across all of Shelter’s Christmas comms, and launched the appeal with a moving hero film based on lived experience, and depicting the reality of living in temporary accommodation as a child during this time. The film follows 8-year old Jayden, as he spends the day practising his smile. The story sets about making our audience fall in love with our little hero, before revealing the real reason he’s having to put on a brave face…

Unusually for the non-profit sector, ‘Brave Face’ was named in the top UK Christmas Ads list in consumer press (The Guardian and The Sun) alongside big-name brands like John Lewis, Boots and Amazon. This put Shelter in front of new audiences through earned media and paved the way for a record amount of donations.

Year 3 - Good As Gold

For 2023, Shelter estimated that there would be over 131,000 children in England waking up in temporary accommodation on Christmas day, an increase of over 10,000 since the previous year and the highest ever recorded. We needed to build on our message from the previous year, whilst ‘exposing’ the hidden homeless crisis in communities across the UK to make the issue really ‘hit home’. This meant reminding people that, without them realising, there could be children in their own towns and communities living in these conditions.

To bring this to life, our Christmas TV advert followed eight-year-old Maddy as she behaves as “good as gold” amongst her neighbours and community, in the hope of being rewarded with the one thing she wants the most for Christmas - a home.

Year 4 - World of Our Own

Our 4th consecutive Christmas ad for Shelter seeks to shed light on the increasingly dire situation of homelessness among children in England. For the first time, over 150,000 children were expected to wake up in temporary accommodation on Christmas morning.

We needed to highlight the worsening situation in a way that evokes empathy while encouraging public donations to Shelter.

Drawing on the lived experiences of those affected, we created ‘World of Our Own’ to illustrate the lengths parents go to to shield their children from the harsh realities of homelessness. The film was scored with Sibylle Baier's “Forget About” and rolled out on TV and social channels across the UK.