When a child becomes sick, it's like their entire life is put on pause.

In a never-before-attempted digital fundraising campaign, we wanted to give people the chance to unpause a child's life with their donation and watch a sick kid return home.

While SickKids had achieved record levels of awareness and industry acclaim with its highly successful 2014 "Better Tomorrows" campaign, the objective this year was to convert that empathy and goodwill into actual donations.

All charities have the exact same donation method. You fill in some fields and hope your money is making a difference. You don't really see the effect your donation has. We decided to change that by reinventing the way to donate, giving people instant gratification – by watching their money actually bring a sick child home. We helped bring this to life by connecting a very simple truth for patients at SickKids: "When a child is diagnosed with an illness, their entire life is put on pause." Sports, school, family vacation etc., it all comes to a complete pause.

We shot updates on six SickKids families introduced during last year's campaign, featuring them as patients whose life stories were put "on pause." The video would start to play and then suddenly pause; we'd invite donors to help "unpause" the story by making a donation online.

Once the user donated, they would get instant gratification by being able to view the rest of the story. This was a never-before-attempted donation approach. Potential donors were also able to see the "social proof" of others who had already made a donation, by having the names of previous donors appear below the video bar – giving them a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves.

The campaign was an overwhelming success. We unpaused all six stories in five weeks during our six-week campaign. We received 370% more online donations than last year's campaign and achieved over 2.7 million views. The campaign received press from numerous TV outlets and created social buzz across Canada, leading to 74.5 million impressions. It was the most successful digital campaign for SickKids Hospital.