Brave the Shave had been running for a number of years. But the fundraising platform had been stalling. Shaving your head is a once-in-a-lifetime ask and Macmillan were running out of willing shavers within their traditional fundraising audience. It was time to innovate.
So we repositioned the platform to younger and more extroverted fundraisers. A generation of donors who are far less likely to consider Macmillan as a charity to fundraise for. But ones who are far more likely to want to take up the extreme challenge of shaving your head for charity.
Our approach was to offer potential shavers the biggest platform to perform their shave on. After all, it is a BIG thing to shave your hair off, you might as well have a BIG stage to do it on, eh?
We launched Brave the Shave’s very own ‘Live Week’ in August 2022. This encouraged fundraisers to sign up for a mass participation event, shared with the nation. In partnership with Global Media, we broadcasted people’s epic efforts across their radio and social brands. As well as featuring real shavers across our direct response fundraising media. This supercharged individuals’ fundraising efforts and gave them the fame and respect their brave act deserved.
The recruitment ads were uniquely shot using a two-way mirror, so that we could capture the whole range of emotions that shavers experience when the clippers hit your hair for the first time. Just ask Nick, our very own CSO who braved the shave himself, how it felt. Nervousness, surprise, joy, fear, terror, regret, elation, all in a few seconds…and captured to use in our fundraising advertising.
This impactful campaign resulted in the video content over delivering on views by 174% and a high CTR of 0.20%. With social channels creating 52m impressions alone.
Want to Brave the Shave? You can find out more about how to make a big difference by shaving your head and raising money for people living with cancer here.
