Digital advertising makes impact beyond the pavement for SickKids Foundation

SickKids Foundation and digital media agency Aber Group set out to recruit participants and encourage them to fundraise for the ‘Million Reasons Run’ campaign. Their focus was on reaching runners, parents with children, and supporters of the 13 participating children’s hospitals. The campaign had the unique challenge of needing to drive awareness as well as recruit virtual community participation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since this was the inaugural year for the ‘Million Reasons Run,’ there wasn’t any pre-existing data to pull from.

Quantcast’s solution was twofold: audiences and insights. Leveraging Quantcast’s live view into consumer behavior, they built a highly niche audience based on running keyword interest to drive consideration and intent. They also placed a pixel on the ‘Million Reasons Run’ homepage, allowing them to collect new data on run registration, ultimately allowing them to grow their donor pool and drive conversions.

The SickKids Foundation created a successful digital advertising campaign that raised awareness, increased donations, and fueled event participation. Over 7,000 home page site visits occurred in the first two weeks with over 600 donation conversions. The run registrations exceeded over 400, and 8,000 people participated in the challenge in May. The campaign raised over $2.2 million in donations overall (129% of goal).

This performance was largely driven by Quantcast’s unique and actionable insights, enabling the team to optimize the campaign and tap into net-new participants across Canada. They discovered that people converting were browsing topics that included family and parenthood, hobbies and interests, and mountain biking. They also learned that conversions increased on Wednesday and Thursday and were especially higher during the second half of the day.