Background

One of the key campaigns we undertake for Starlight Children's Foundation, aside from our ongoing work, is delivering the national PR for Starlight Day in May – Starlight Children’s Foundation’s most important annual fundraising event.  PR is the largest single voice for Starlight Day. There are no media partnerships, no signed ambassadors – each year we start fresh.

The strategy is a careful balance of feel good coverage and getting across the need for help. Celebrities are part of our strategy for some media while grass roots real-life stories also need to be communicated.

Last year posed one of the most challenging strategies we have ever had to develop and implement.

Early in the year, due to the economic climate, Starlight faced a $2m drop in revenue for 2009.

The situation was (and is) very serious. Services and staff have been cut, wishes cannot be granted, Starlight Vans have been taken off the road, Starlight Express Rooms in hospitals are operating with reduced hours. Painful decisions have had to be made.

Starlight needed donations – fast – but Starlight Day was only a couple of months away. We didn’t want to cannibalise donations or media coverage.

Plus there were another 30 or so not-for-profits concerned with children or medical issues jostling for donations and media coverage too.

Results

We created a strong economic crisis PR campaign and dovetailed it with the Starlight Day campaign.

We waited as long as we could, before launching in order to reduce the time between both campaigns which, in effect, became one.

Getting the messages right was absolutely imperative. We spent many many hours developing key messages, Q&As, issues management strategies and fully briefing the right spokespeople.

We developed messages that crossed the economic crisis and Starlight Day campaigns.

We made sure no one in the organisation strayed from the strategy – including staff who had been made redundant and may have an axe to grind.

One of our targets to reach corporate was major business media – the very journalists who would be the most likely to ask the hard questions, no matter if they were valid or not.

After the initial campaign burst of economic crisis ended, we began introducing more solutions based messages, including Starlight Day.

This then morphed into being more about Starlight Day with second tier messages about the impact of the economic crisis.

The story broke around the same time as a segment we organised on the Today Show, who also ran with the economic crisis angle, but included the human side of the situation.

From then on, the focus was on:

• Major media hits – particularly TV, major newspapers, magazines, radio interviews on breakfast, morning and drive time, online media - all supported by local and suburban media

• Gaining third party endorsement wherever possible

As we moved more into Starlight Day, we then:

• Proactively pitched individual stories to major media in TV, print and radio with celebrities

• Carefully identified appropriate volunteer, family and stories for major media

• Ensured local and suburban media was actively targeted

Ultimately, we secured 201 stories nationally (including SMH and The Age) on the economic crisis campaign alone, reaching an audience of 3.6 million.

During this time, donations rose 200% over the corresponding period the previous year.

The objective of achieving high quality coverage was met, with key messages contained in all coverage.

During the period of the campaign (Feb – May) there were 849 media items.

The client has independently valued the coverage at $13,380,732. This is the advertising space rate with no multiplier.

Starlight Day reached its fund raising target – despite the earlier spike in donations during the initial stages of the campaign.