The Challenge
The Hospital for Sick Children (known as SickKids) celebrated their 150-year anniversary in 2025. With this big milestone came big ambitions. While the goal was to recruit new donors, donors were not our specific audience—humans were. And, as the #2 pediatric hospital in the world, SickKids’ target stretches outside of its local borders. The reality is that in 2025, the world felt like an especially tough place for humans. Everywhere you turn, there’s heaviness and stress. We don’t know what the future holds anymore, and it feels like there’s a new “unprecedented crisis” every other week. But donations, to any cause, are down. We’re becoming desensitized to all the issues in the world, and feel like our dollars won’t be enough to make a difference. If we have the extra dollars to begin with. In other words: we needed a campaign that would reinvigorate the love for a 150-year-old brand, and encourage hospital donations during a time when people were being tighter with their wallets than ever. Instead, we needed to focus on the future and give our audience a reason to feel compelled to help. To give them something to fight for. To give them a reason to care about SickKids’ 150th anniversary. To turn that reason into donations that would support the next 150 years. And so our universal, strategic insight became incredibly clear. This campaign is about birthdays. Not SickKids’ birthday, but the birthday that every single patient at SickKids is already fighting for: their next one.
The Solution
SickKids has made incredible achievements throughout its 150-year history. It would have been simple to focus the creative on telling the story of those medical breakthroughs and the countless lives SickKids has saved. Our strategy instead focused on the future. Not just the hospital’s, but more importantly, the future of every single child who walks through SickKids’ doors. “The Count” transformed the hospital’s 150th anniversary into something human: the fight of each patient to get to their next birthday. This made an institutional milestone feel personal, and an insurmountable problem feel achievable. For SickKids patients, making it from one birthday to the next isn’t a given. It’s a fight. Each day, week, and month, patients, families, and the hospital fight forward. Their fight is not dissimilar to that of a professional athlete. The game, match or bout is just a marker. The real fight is what happens every day before that. So, we joined two highly distinct visual and emotional worlds: athletic training, and children’s birthdays. Featuring real SickKids patients in a series of athletic training scenes blended with birthday imagery, we depicted patients literally training and fighting for their next birthday. Surrealist sequences and real life moments are interwoven to create a genre-defying tapestry that communicates the emotional truth of an experience that cannot be put into words. The campaign drove both immediate donations and long-term behavior-change, overcoming key obstacles and exceeding expectations.
