Create for Dementia

A national peer-to-peer fundraising campaign to get Kiwis creating for a cause

Alzheimer’s New Zealand is a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting individuals and families affected by dementia, particularly Alzheimer’s disease, in Aotearoa New Zealand. They work to raise awareness about dementia, provide information and resources, offer support services, and advocate for the needs of people living with dementia and their caregivers.

It’s estimated that around 70,000 Kiwis are currently living with dementia, and that number is expected to more than triple by 2050. So the work that Alzheimers New Zealand is of increasing importance, and Obvious is proud to have been working alongside them for a number of years, with a particular focus on supporting their digital fundraising efforts.

The campaign concept

We approached Alzheimers New Zealand with the concept of a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, in a similar vein to well-known campaigns like Relay for Life, Sweat With Pride, and Shave for a Cure. The campaign was aimed at activating creative communities specifically, with an ask for them to set themselves a creative challenge for the month of June and leverage their own networks to raise funds on behalf of Alzheimers New Zealand.

We’d already worked with them on a similar campaign called Move for Dementia, which was focused (as you may be able to guess) around getting people up and moving. So we thought this creative version would make the perfect sister campaign, and we settled on the name Create for Dementia.

As a brand with a particularly clinical identity, we quickly recognised that Create for Dementia needed its own campaign identity, one that reflected the creativity we were asking of our participants but also still maintained a strong connection to Alzheimers New Zealand.

Key campaign deliverables

Social media

As a social engagement campaign, Meta Ads were our primary marketing channel for getting the word out and engaging both creators and donors in the first instance. We saw an overwhelming response in the comments of our ads and posts, with many people sharing their own personal stories and experiences of dementia mate wareware.

Reading through these, engaging in conversation, and building an engaged and passionate community around this cause was by far the biggest highlight for us.

Key campaign deliverables

Street posters - SHOUT Media

Through our partnership with the legends at Shout Media, we ran a nationwide street poster campaign during the month of March to promote creator registrations and raise general brand awareness for the event.

While the direct ROI of street posters can be challenging to track, we’re firm believers in using out-of-home marketing like posters and billboards to reinforce the messaging in the real world that your audience is seeing online, as well as raising the campaign’s profile in terms of both reach and legitimacy.

*based on traffic estimations from NZTA

Key campaign deliverables

Noticeboards

As a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, we identified high school students as another possible target audience to promote creator registrations.

Luckily for us, we were able to utilise Noticeboards, a content display network of screens in secondary schools throughout Aotearoa, getting the message right in front of students in their place of learning.

Key campaign deliverables

Email Marketing

A priority for us was to keep our creators engaged in the lead up and during the campaign to ensure they continued to create and fundraise. Direct email marketing via Mailchimp was a key way of reaching our creators. Over the course of the campaign, we sent emails on a number of different topics, from fundraising tips to education around dementia and Alzheimers NZ.

When compared to Mailchimp’s benchmarking statistics, you can see that the performance of our email campaigns was over double that of average campaigns within both the arts and non-profit communities.