THE CHALLENGE

The Global Fund was created in 2002 in an act of global solidarity and leadership to fight the world’s deadliest pandemics: HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria. For over 20 years, the partnership has saved more than 50 million lives, due to the increased developments and access to medications around the world.

Just before its 2022 fundraising cycle, the Covid-19 pandemic was quickly spreading, adding complexity to the healthcare landscape and causing many donor countries to divert their efforts and funding to fight this new pandemic. Suddenly, the deadly, on-going, yet treatable epidemics like HIV, TB & malaria seemed to fall further down the priority list.

The Global Fund needed to raise an enormous amount of money to ensure continued progress and get hundreds of its global projects on track. We were challenged to create a compelling and powerful campaign to help it raise billions of dollars.

THE STRATEGY

Given the healthcare landscape at the time, we knew highlighting numbers and statistics wouldn’t be enough to cut through and drive significant fundraising. Instead, we needed to hone in on the personal stories of healthcare providers, activists and survivors to drive proximity and relevancy, connect deeper and inspire action with our target audiences: global world leaders and private donors.

We created the “Fight for What Counts” campaign, harnessing the power of the Global Fund to promote the amazing and triumphant stories of its network to drive action-based conversations around critical aid. Our goal was to facilitate funding decision-making, by reminding world leaders that the Global Fund is the world’s proven effort to fight diseases globally.

Our integrated campaign approach ensured that our message came through in a clear, compelling, and consistent way across every touch point for world leaders and major private donors, driven by the depth and strength of the Global Fund.

THE EXECUTION

The “Fight for What Counts” campaign kicked off with the Global Fund’s Preparatory meeting, which was hosted by five African nations with 140+ heads of state in attendance. During the meeting, the Global Fund presented its Investment Case, whose content was used as the foundation and proof point of our campaign.

We created a new identity, which encapsulated the Global Fund movement, with its people and their stories at the heart of all of the communications and promotional fundraising content.

Following the campaign’s launch, we created 500+ assets to be used during the 8-month fundraising campaign at events and for online and social media promotion. We also secured 360 minutes of pro-bono ad space in Times Square (New York City). At the final Pledge Conference, which took place in New York City, we orchestrated an immersive experience for our target audiences that featured multidirectional sound, projections & stage moments that put the people of the fight in the spotlight.

The Outcome

Funding for this cycle is still ongoing but the “Fight for What Counts” campaign has already garnered the highest donation amount ever raised by a public health campaign in history.

To date, the Global Fund has raised a record-breaking $15.7B+. We have also seen incredible engagement numbers:

• The campaign’s launch hero film was retweeted by Bill Gates, who organically has a reach of 60M.
• The follow-up hero film, which depicted the movement behind the Global Fund, developed for the second half of the campaign, generated 1.5M organic views within the first 24 hours.
• The pro-bono OOH in Times Square, worth $250k garnered approx. 1.5M impressions over the period it was live.