2023 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Despite Canada’s commitment to equal public healthcare for all, the truth is that access to healthcare and quality of care can vary significantly across communities. This is the challenge currently facing the district of Scarborough, which accounts for 25% of Toronto’s population yet receives less than 1% of hospital donations. SHN wanted to vastly increase buzz and garner more donations to close that gap.

At a time when many are working to address past inequalities and make things as fair as possible, Toronto was turning its back on a big part of what makes the city special. Given the key target was people with disposable money, they knew that in Toronto, that often goes hand in hand with progressive politics. They needed to show Toronto that the very people it professes to care about were being left behind in the health sector. They wanted to highlight this inequality and make Canadians stand up and take notice that Scarborough needed them to pitch in.

Love, Scarborough is an integrated campaign created to kick off a historic donation push for SHN. The campaign is designed to raise awareness for the need to close Toronto’s healthcare gap by driving donations not just from Scarborough,
but across the Greater Toronto Area.

The campaign is built around the idea of an open letter from Scarborough to the rest of the city imploring them to help level the playing field. The hero film asks the hard-hitting question: when will we all be treated equally? And brings attention to the fact that right now the city’s most diverse area is also its most ignored.

Throughout the campaign, the font that is featured was created from the real handwriting of 26 different individuals connected to SHN – one for each letter of the alphabet. On LoveScarborough.ca, visitors can learn about these people’s stories and even submit their own story using the font, aptly named “Scarborough Sans.”

The response to the campaign has been staggering. The campaign immediately garnered local and national press coverage. In the first month alone, traffic to the SHN website increased by 400% from the year prior. SHN’s social channels saw over 20,000 engagements in the first three weeks and a 25% increase in followers. The Mayor of Toronto even named January 13th Love Scarborough Day in the city.

The demand for t-shirts with the Love, Scarborough logo was so high that SHN partnered with a local apparel company to produce a line of Love, Scarborough clothing with 100% of the proceeds going to SHN.

But more importantly, the campaign didn’t just generate conversation and local pride, it generated donations. The very day the campaign was launched, one million dollars was donated to SHN. In the first month of the campaign the number of online donors increased by +281% and the total value of online donations increased by +296%. In the first two months of the campaign, offline donations had already exceeded the entire previous year by +217%. Ultimately SHN was able to reach its wildly ambitious goal of $100M in donations within the year - not bad ROI for a campaign
that cost less than 0.5% of the total donations.

Credits

MediaCom
- Natalia Nossovskaia
- Claire Crombez
- Mario Downer
- Kevin Johnson
- Kieran Miles
- Kevin Ngo
- Leighann McKee
- Veronica Grygorcewicz
- Jacob Buggelli
- Wonjay Chang
- Nissa Pollowy
- Ritu Roy
- Ali Malik
- Urania Agas
- Ken Lee
- Niri Panaram
- Jonas Rodrigues
- Chris Lamb

Ogilvy
- Megan Farquhar
- Brian Murray
- Brian Allen
- Noah Feferman
- Heather MacDonald
- Brian Allen
- Jonathan Careless
- Stefan Murray
- Andrew Schulze
- David Scanlon
- Tom Kenny
- Amy Smith