THE CHALLENGE

Food insecurity has been a substantial issue in Canada for decades – before the pandemic, 4.4 million Canadians were already food insecure – which during the pandemic became a prominent news story. But even though Canada is one of the richest countries in the world, the need continues to grow at an alarming rate. Food insecurity numbers in Canada are increasing year over year in the double digits and Canada. In march of 2022, we had reached a level of crisis, with over a million people seeking the help of a food bank in a single month.

As a charity, nearly 100% of Canadians are aware of Food Banks Canada, but confusion exists on the breadth and scope of it’s mission to relieve hunger today and prevent hunger tomorrow.

Canadians were primed to stay involved in the issue of food insecurity but we needed to reframe how Food Banks Canada is actually fighting for all Canadians and working to see a Canada where no one suffers the effects of going hungry.

“What we are seeing is the combination of long-term effects to a broken social safety net combined with the effects of inflation and high costs driving more people to use food banks than ever before in Canadian history. Behind each one of these numbers is a person who is struggling too much to get by.

This is the future of our country, this is who is going to be our future leaders, scientists, artists. When you're going to school hungry, you're not learning, you're not focusing, you're not setting yourself up to thrive.”

 - Kirstin Beardsley CEO Food Banks Canada

Canadians can’t afford for us to passively talk about this issue any longer.

STRATEGY

We reframed the issue by turning it on its head. Rather than feeding hunger with a single meal, we invited Canadians to starve the problem for good.

To stop hunger in its tracks, we needed to make people realize how much bigger hunger is than we commonly think.  Hunger is taking over too many Canadians lives. It’s much bigger than just being hungry. Hunger is eating away at the potential of our people. It prevents us from reaching our potential, and the future of Canada as a whole. We needed to stop talking about feeding hungry people and we called on Canadians to fight back and starve the hunger out of Canada.

Because we should be afraid at how unnoticed this crisis has become.

CREATIVE

The campaign launched with a two-minute brand film brought hunger to life in an unexpected, and terrifying fashion anchoring a National movement followed.

To start a food movement in Canada, we had to bring the enemy to life. We did so in a brand film, using personification to show the increasingly serious impacts of food insecurity and then the incredible change that awaits if we can solve this societal problem.  The film isn’t unrealistic though…it ends by showing that hunger will continue to rob people of life’s richness if we don’t defeat the enemy for good.

The brand film led to starvethehunger.ca – a website that explains the issue in full as well as highlighting all of the work Food Banks Canada is doing to end food insecurity, including pushing for policies that address the root causes, executing leading-edge research, and working in partnership with more than 4750 organizations coast to coast to coast to maximize their efforts.  The :06s videos drive to deeper pages within the site to make the journey easy for Canadians to join the cause. For example, the donate money :06s video led directly to a donation page, while the donate food :06s drove the user to find their nearest food bank.

The campaign was coordinated with the launch of Food Banks Canada’s The HungerCount 2022, a published research document targeting public officials that highlights the crisis levels of hunger in Canada and shines a light on the advocacy efforts of how we fight food insecurity.

The “stave the hunger” message carried across all campaign elements, including OOH, social media, :30s and :60s TV and 4 x :06s digital video.  The campaign ran nationally launching Thanksgiving weekend and running to the holidays, a time of year when many feel the most dramatic impacts of being food insecure.

RESULTS

Starve The Hunger is the most successful brand campaign in Food Banks Canada history. The campaign garnered more than 34 million earned media impressions, 500% over the campaign benchmarks. The campaign videos had an impressive .64% completion rate (industry standard is .06% - .012%) and most critically had an increase in website click throughs of over 220% compared to the last awareness campaign window.