The Background
FareShare are passionate about one thing: making sure good food reaches people who need it, not landfill. Every week they provide enough food to create almost 2.5 million meals for vulnerable people — yet 3 million tonnes of food still goes to waste in the UK every year. When they came to us to develop a new fundraising product, we jumped at it.
The Brief
FareShare wanted a new community fundraising product built around food — something that connected directly to their core belief that no good food should ever go to waste. They wanted to attract new donors, grow their mass participation offering, and create something with longevity; an event that could work year after year for existing audiences while pulling in new ones.
The target was an average fundraising value of £100-£170 per participant. And with their top website users already passionate about food and cooking, we had a great audience to build from.
The Work
We presented a shortlist of ideas and the team landed on The Zero Waste Challenge. The concept is exactly what it sounds like: participants commit to generating absolutely zero food waste for a month — every peeling, every leftover, every scrap has to make it to the plate — and ask friends and family to sponsor them.
We knew it was a tough ask. But FareShare's audience skews towards activism, and that's exactly the kind of crowd that leans into a hard challenge. We tweaked the timings slightly to a two-week window, with the flexibility to take part for as little or as long as participants could manage.
Our creative team built a bold, fun look and feel around foodie pun slogans, using circular food items in place of the "O" throughout — so even at a glance, the food connection was unmistakable. We also coined the term Zero Hero to give participants something to wear with pride.
Beyond fundraising, the campaign is built to educate. Every participant gets a digital fundraising pack loaded with zero waste recipes, plus practical tips and tricks for cutting food waste in their own lives.
The Zero Waste Challenge landed so well that the Facebook community group was left open after the campaign ended, keeping the conversation going. Based on year one, year two is already in planning.