UNICEF & Dulux Own A Colour site raises £75,000 in under two weeks
Howard Lake | 13 October 2011 | News
Own A Colour, the campaign by Dulux to ‘sell’ the 16.77 million colours on a computer screen to raise money for UNICEF raised £51,000 on its first day when it was launched on 29 September. Two weeks later the total has exceeded £75,000.
For a minimum donation of £1, any colour can be bought via ownacolour.com, with every pound raised donated to UNICEF.
The striking visual campaign builds on the success of initiatives like I CAN’s Adopt A Word campaign, and the pixel-based Milliondollarhomepage.com of Alex Tew and Tate Britain’s buy-a-pixel campaign to save Turner’s The Blue Rigi for the nation in 2007.
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Own A Colour was launched by senior marketers of AkzoNobel Decorative Paints, the world’s biggest paint company and owners of the Dulux brand, at their Annual Global Marketing Conference in Rome. Social media promotion on the day resulted in the #ownacolour hashtag becoming the most popular phrase on Twitter in the UK.
After the initial success in the UK, the Own A Colour team plan to drive further take-up around the world. So far, people from 50 countries have donated.
The campaign will run for up to a year but of course organisers hope to sell the colours before then. There are 16,777,216 different colours that can be displayed on a 24 bit display computer screen, which covers most PCs and the more recent mobile phone displays.
The colour ‘blackberry‘ was bought recently by a fundraiser from another charity, who used it as a humorous comment on the current travails of Blackberry mobile phone users who had suffered days of downtime:
UNICEF’s Goodwill Ambassador Sir Roger Moore explains Own A Colour
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.