Leeds Hospitals Charity Case Study

Promoting the Leeds Bear Hunt

Client Overview

Client

Leeds Hospitals Charity

Industry

Charity

Services

Marketing & Media

Brief

During Summer 2023, Leeds Hospital Charity launched the Leeds Bear Hunt, a free family-friendly trail of discovery, featuring over fifty giant Bear sculptures around the city of Leeds which aimed to bring Michael Rosen’s iconic We’re Going on a Bear Hunt story to life. The key message of this engaging story is about how we deal with our fears which is reflected in the experience of many children in hospital, who might be scared of the unknown, or possibly the knowledge of what is to come.

With the money raised from the Bear Hunt, Leeds Hospitals Charity hoped to create a Leeds Children’s Hospital that is a welcoming and reassuring place, with a hospital team that is equipped to support children and families facing their own “Bear”.

As the event was taking place over the summer holidays, the charity wanted to be kept top-of-mind when adults, specifically parents and grandparents, were planning fun activities to do with their children/grandchildren during the school break.

The Ark Media was tasked with raising awareness of the Leeds Bear Hunt event across the city, encouraging as many people as possible to head into the City Centre to take part in the trail.

Solution

To deliver an effective and integrated campaign for Leeds Hospitals Charity, we selected Out of Home media formats such as bus rears, rail 4 sheets, streethubs, bus shelters, static 48 sheets, digital 48 sheets and digital mega 6. These formats helped us to ensure both a high reach and frequency in relation to the charity’s key target audiences, whilst also giving them high coverage across the city of Leeds.

On the digital sites, we took advantage of using multiple creatives, as a way to create hype around the event. We used a countdown creative in the lead-up to the launch and then switched to a ‘we’re here’ message over the course of the hunt.

In addition to the Out of Home activity, we used our connections to set up a partnership between Leeds Hospitals Charity and one of our bakery clients, Gilchrist Bakers. We facilitated Gilchrist producing paw print-shaped, branded, biscuits that Leeds Hospitals Charity were able to sell at their pop-up shops throughout the trail over the summer, to help boost donations further for the charity.

Once again, thanks to our close relationships with various media owners, we were able to obtain several digital 48 sheets free of charge for the campaign, as a way to further push participation and donations for this important cause. The free-of-charge media space enabled us to achieve an extra 5,745,490 impressions over the course of the campaign, with the overall campaign achieving 11,170,290 impressions over the 4-week period.

Results

The hunt came to and end of the 9th September 2023, and the campaign's success metrics speak volumes: 43,358,814 steps walked over 20,000 miles, 253,779 bear sightings, and 7,000 app downloads, reflecting the overwhelming community engagement and support for Leeds Hospitals Charity. The Bear Hunt team also won the 2023 Year of Culture Project award at the Leeds Compassionate City Awards.

The client had the following to say on the campaign;