Byte Night

Raising money for a very worthy cause

Disciplines—

advertising + media + digital + integrated

Challenge—

For the fourth year running, Banner was invited to lead the marketing campaign for Byte Night.

Byte Night is NCH’s flagship fundraising event where people in the IT industry sleep rough for one night to raise money. The objective for this year was to continue to raise the event’s profile by creating an even more engaging and moving ad campaign. This year also saw the launch of Byte Night Local – an event where people can raise money by sleeping out in their own garden.

For both events, we needed to use any and all forms of marketing and advertising at our disposal. What’s more, like previous years, all our work was provided free of charge.

Solution—

We created a fully integrated campaign that included awareness ads, an email campaign, online banner ads, a website and even some Wee Willy Winky hats for the night itself.

The ads were based around one important thought: your support could change hundreds of lives for the better. The email campaign had a three-pronged attack: a member-get-member message, a past sleeper appeal (to sleep again), and a message to people who’d never slept out for the cause before.

Everything we produced drove people to a website where further information on the event and registration took place.

Results—

A record breaking 270 IT executives slept in Potter’s Fields, London for Byte Night.

This helped raise over £340,000, the highest amount ever raised. The first Byte Night Local also got off to a good start with over 60 people sleeping out in their own back gardens.

The Banner team alone managed to raise over £10,500 for the big sleepout. We ranked number two out of 35 teams and ended up just under Dell who raised only a couple hundred more pounds on the leaderboard. Not only that, Banner also managed to secure a whopping £180,000 worth of free advertising space throughout a number of well known IT publications such as IT Week, Computer Weekly and MacWorld.

Contact—

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