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Raising Awareness & Funds – How Viral Nation Helped The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Break Records With Influencer Marketing

By: Viral Nation | 2 mins read |

The TL;DR Version

“Conquer cancer in our lifetime” - realizing such a vision requires help from all corners. This campaign put an online fundraising campaign and gaming community together. The objective - to help the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation (PMCF) raise funds. PMCF is among Canada’s most respected charitable organizations, raising funds to help care for more than 18,000 new patients each year. The top-notch clinical programming at PMCF consistently ranks in the Top 5 of all major cancer centers worldwide. They targeted the gaming community, an audience they have never targeted before, to raise funds for their initiatives.  Using two gaming influencers to lead the pack, Quest to Conquer Cancer 2020 broke fundraising records. The campaign featured an influencer campaign as well as a supporting social media initiative with email marketing. Together, the campaign raised awareness for PMCF’s work and raised valuable funds that support their quest to conquer cancer in our lifetime. 

The Outcome

With the global pandemic throwing things off balance, the campaign churned out stellar results on all fronts. From its launch in late October through to the end of December, the Quest website received 102,210 total unique visits, with peak traffic occurring the week of the marquee event at 22.5K visitors. The critical number, that being the funds raised, touched CAD 360,000!  The Perksy Brand Awareness study concluded that at the end of the campaign, one-third (29%) of Canadian respondents were aware of the Quest to Conquer Cancer charity event, besting all other events in the study.

Bringing Quest To Conquer Cancer To Life

The strategy for the campaign had to be comprehensive. This involved building awareness around the brand Quest to Conquer Cancer and driving donations on the newly created website. The VN team developed 40+ pieces of content for organic social media promotions on the new social channels, including other digital campaigns across various platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Search, and Google Display networks. The campaign was a huge success, launching in October and running through the end of the year. Two gaming influencers with a significant following were also onboarded to promote the marquee event, a week of online streams of the popular games, with Quest’s messaging strongly embedded in the streams. This content was also supported by an email campaign that consisted of 20+ emails with strategic and timely messaging around the quest brand pillars.  A Perksy brand awareness study was commissioned to help analyze campaign performance and create historical benchmarks for awareness, affinity, sentiment, and donation intent. The results of the study showed that the campaign outperformed the benchmarks on most parameters and built a lasting relationship with the community through the campaign. 

The Viral POV

Viral Nation partnered up with Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation to build a new fundraising campaign rooted in gamification. Our goal was to help them connect to an untapped audience - the eSports and gaming communities in a week-long virtual streaming event, Quest Together, Conquer Together. -Alice Fenwick, Account Director at Viral Nation  

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Viral Nation

Viral Nation is a new media innovation group that powers the social ecosystem through integrated solutions that align strategy, talent, media, and technology. As pioneers in the influencer space, Viral Nation is comprised of a full-service creative agency, a creator and athlete-influencer representation agency, and a technology division creating modern marketing solutions for the social media age.