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Over 1 million older people are chronically lonely in the UK. This reality is none more stark and poignant than during Christmas, a traditional time of togetherness. Age UK challenged us to punch through the festive advertising noise with a very modest budget and raise awareness for the charity’s efforts to combat loneliness in the UK. At the heart of the ambition was to get people to emotionally connect to the issue of loneliness amongst older people and then act on it in the form of donating or volunteering.

We adapted the stories of real older people into monologues dramatizing the emotional effects of living with loneliness.

The central campaign strategy was ‘one for the one million.’ The scale of loneliness amongst older people in the UK is vast. It is also elusive – it is hard to define, difficult to see and often the sufferers struggle to speak out. We therefore needed to make the issue real and the one million sufferers tangible to our audience. We did this by focusing our attention on individuals, on real older people living with loneliness. We would make their moving and inspirational stories representative of the broader issue and inspire empathy in the audience. We wanted to make it impossible for them to turn away from the reality of loneliness.

It wouldn’t have been enough to simply document the lives of these real older people, we needed to ensure our audience connected with them in a meaningful way. As such, we set out to elevate their stories into short dramatic films. We took the older people’s own words and adapted them into monologue scripts, which were then performed by our highly accomplished professional actors, James Bolam and Miram Margolyes.

The result was a beautifully crafted piece of drama that captured the realities of living with loneliness in an honest, quiet, and hauntingly captivating way – a stark contrast to the high octane production around Christmas.

The performance of the content itself surpassed all of the brand’s benchmarks, garnering over 5.6 million views and 228,300 clicks, which alone can be deemed a success.

However, even more promisingly, the films also inspired our audience to act and resulted in unprecedented levels of engagement with the brand. An incredible 24,470 people enquired about volunteering with Age UK, and of these 750 are already in training. This is 12 times the average number of calls they get on any given year.

Furthermore, 153 older people signed up to receive Age UK’s call in time service, proving that the campaign clearly demonstrated the benefits of the brand’s services to those who need them the most.

All of this then translated to the bottom line with cash donations achieving a 4% uplift.

So whether people were voting their feet or their wallets, we know the nation got behind Age UK’s campaign to ensure that ‘no one should have no one at Christmas.’