'It's amazing what you can get out of an envelope'

As most important event in Christian Aid’s calendar, Christian Aid Week raises £15 million a year. However, most of this money is generated offline through their ‘red envelope’ door drops. 

After setting the online strategy GT created a visually arresting campaign including emails, online ads and a microsite exploring the theme “it’s amazing what you can get out of an envelope”. The site http://caweek.org was designed to generate online donations by using the familiar red envelope to illustrate what happens to any money raised. The envelope unfolds to reveal a 3D depiction of a flourishing developing world that reinforces the “you add, we multiply” message. 

Given that the audience were unlikely to be that web savvy, the site needed to be easy to use and easy to understand. Whilst our primary purpose was to generate donations, we also encouraged visitors to pass along ‘virtual envelopes’, participate in virtual gifting and to use the Surefish Search Engine – a search engine that sees all its profits go to Christian Aid.

In addition to press ads, traffic was directly driven to the site by email, of which there were 14 variations for the different target audiences. Further site visits were generated by the pass along mechanic - with anybody sending a ‘virtual envelope’ able to track how much their pass along activity raised.