7 Christmas campaigns to whet the appetite
Melanie May | 28 November 2016 | News
The festive season starts in earnest this week as December arrives and Advent calendars begin their countdown to the big day, so here are seven very different Christmas campaigns and fundraising events as a taster of what’s to come.
1) PizzaExpress & Macmillan Snowball Dough Ball Day
PizzaExpress is offering a free festive doughball dessert on 29th November to raise funds for Macmillan. Anyone who goes into their local PizzaExpress and says: “Free Snowball Dough Balls please” will receive a portion of Snowball Dough Balls, which combine PizzaExpress’s Dough Balls, with a sprinkle of cinnamon, icing sugar and vanilla cream dip. The restaurant is suggesting a £1 donation per portion, which will go to Macmillan Cancer Support. People are also being asked to share their Snowball Dough Balls with Macmillan Cancer Support on social media. PizzaExpress has been working with Macmillan since March this year, and with every Padana pizza bought, a discretionary 25p is donated to the charity.
2) MS Society #MerryMoments
MS Society has launched its #Merrymoments campaign, which asks people to share stories, pictures and videos of their #Merrymoments on social media or via christmas.mssociety.org.uk, vote for their favourite using the ‘heart’ button and make a donation to the charity. The charity is working with digital agency SMACK, which has produced a dedicated microsite to showcase the stories and images shared on social media, and will complement MS Society’s print mailer which is themed around the tradition Christmas paperchain. An appeal film will also be launched to tie in with the campaign.
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3) London Business School Community Toy Drive
London Business School’s Community Action Group and its Student Volunteering Club will donate hundreds of presents to local Marylebone children aged between 0 and 12 years, in the run-up to the Christmas holiday. This is the eighth year the School has run the toy drive and so far more than 3,000 toys have been donated. Students, faculty and staff buy gifts for children who are living in areas of greatest social need or are currently being treated at St Mary’s Hospital paediatric intensive care unit. The gifts are handed out at local nurseries, a youth club, children’s parties on the Lisson Green Estate and in Church Street, and the children’s ward at St Mary’s Hospital.
4) Brain Tumour Research Cure campaign
Brain Tumour Research’s Christmas campaign runs in train carriages across the London tube network, from 21st November for two weeks and features a letter penned by two girls to their father who they lost to a brain tumour. This is the second Christmas without their father Steve who used to work on London Underground and their letter is an emotional appeal for donations to fund research into brain tumours. It asks people to text CURE to 70660 to donate £5.
[youtube height=”450″width=”800″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3lRiwaAuPo[/youtube]
5) Pret Opening Doors Christmas campaign
Pret’s Christmas campaign focuses on its apprenticeship scheme for homeless people with a film showing how it works. 10p from every soup sale, and 50p from every sale of a Christmas sandwich goes towards supporting this programme with Pret hoping to raise £1.7m this year. More than 350 people have taken part in the scheme over the past eight years with 75% graduating from the three-month course, which provides job training as well as counselling and other support, and around 150 are still working at Pret.
[youtube height=”450″width=”800″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9pd6F7Wojk[/youtube]
6) Alzheimer’s Research UK Santa Forgot
Narrated by Stephen Fry and with visuals by Aardman, Alzheimer’s Research UK’s Christmas campaign imagines a world where Santa is living with the effects of dementia and no longer visits children on Christmas Eve. It shows that dementia can affect anyone, even Santa, but that research holds the key to defeating it and asks people to donate £5 by text to fund research into the illness.
Today, we're launching no one should have no one at Christmas. Find out how you can help us #Endloneliness: https://t.co/WUfAh2Ww1c pic.twitter.com/l2vKw2H57v
— Age UK (@age_uk) November 21, 2016
7) Age UK No one should have no one at Christmas
Age UK is using geo-targeted messaging in its Christmas campaign this year with ‘No one should have no one at Christmas’ running on roadside digital billboards until 4th December as part of a wider integrated campaign. The billboard ads show locally relevant messages, such as ‘There are 41,000 lonely older people in the West Midlands’ which is running in Birmingham. The campaign aims to raise awareness of the plight of lonely older people at this time of year and asks people to #EndLoneliness by donating to help the charity help more older people, or volunteering locally themselves.
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.