Secret Santa: A Christmas Campaign Refresh for Action for Children
Background
Action for Children works to improve life for children across the UK, giving every child a safe and happy childhood. Their flagship Christmas fundraising campaign, Secret Santa, had run successfully for several years — but they wanted a creative refresh to make this year their best yet.
The Brief
After several successful years, Action for Children invited us to pitch for the work: help elevate brand awareness and sharpen the charity's ownership of the Secret Santa campaign. Christmas fundraising is a crowded market, so cut-through and relevance were everything. They wanted the campaign to feel more urgent, reach a new audience, and give the existing creative a proper update. We were delighted to get the call.
The Work
We started by digging into performance data from previous years, mapping opportunity areas and new audiences, and building a messaging hierarchy to shape the proposition.
The creative stage was a joy. Action for Children had already fallen for one of the concepts we'd presented at pitch, so it became a case of refining the details, adding a final layer of polish, and getting it ready to go.
We saw a clear opportunity to strengthen brand awareness by dialling up the red and white across the ads, bringing the whole campaign into its own paper cut-out world — a style reminiscent of traditional Christmas cards, which also gave Action for Children the flexibility to take the designs in-house in future years.
We produced a full suite of Secret Santa assets: digital and out-of-home advertising, static and animated end frames, and a creative toolkit to keep everything consistent.
We also developed a case study film with our extended family at Progress, built to run across their social channels — handling the script and storyboard, sourcing and recording the voiceover, animating the film, and taking it through full post-production.
Alongside the campaign, we ran a co-creation workshop with Action for Children and their media agency to generate activation ideas and help the campaign travel further. From a strong shortlist, Action for Children chose to pilot the Secret Santa Choir — launching at a smaller scale this year, with bigger plans in the pipeline.
Finally, we partnered with Action for Children and Progress on the TV advert, bringing the paper cut-out characters to life on screen to show the transformation in children's lives thanks to the Secret Santas all around us. We were involved at every stage: storyboarding, scripting, voiceover, animation, design, music, edit, post-production, and delivery to all TV stations.
Results
The Secret Santa campaign raised £1.7 million in donations for Action for Children.