With high-street footfall recovering from historic lows, The Big Issue urgently needed to boost sales and make vendors visible.
Our Big Wish campaign, co-created with vendors, brought their stories to life and drove donations.
Helping to keep them afloat during challenging times, and giving them new ideas and hope into the future.
Christmas is a time for wishes – some of them for world peace, others for an early-morning flurry of snow, others just for the latest hard-to-find toy.
The Big Issue’s wish is to dismantle poverty through offering a hand up, not a hand out. For their vendors, each of whom deal with starkly different types of Christmas wishes, that overarching aim can be life-changing.
We began with the urgent and heartfelt wish at the centre of The Big Issue’s work, and the personal stories of each of their vendors. We then connected to the actions of supporters and donors: their power to make Christmas wishes come true.
Our “The Big Wish” campaign was built around photography of several vendors, supported by storyteling around the unique, funny, or touching wishes that each of them had. Each creative heroed a different Big Wish from around the UK, highlighting the different levels of support that The Big Issue offer and the work that it does on a larger scale.
We put the recipients of the charity at the heart of the idea, co-creating with the vendors to bring to life their Big Christmas Wishes through illustrations, and eventually donations.
We created a toolkit of social and digital assets to power a varied, reactive-ready social campaign across Instagram and Twitter, supported by print assets in national papers and across various OOH sites. We also produced a hero film to grab attention online and explain the concept of the campaign, and developed an influencer strategy to push our message further.
Our campaign – devised and delivered in less than a month – enabled The Big Issue to make a difference over the festive period, and keep their income steady despite a 70% fall in high street footfall.