Australian Paralympic Committee asks public to ‘pledge their belief’ in campaign to get athletes to Sochi
The Australian Paralympic Committee (APC) has launched a new campaign promoting its fundraising efforts, urging the Australian public to ‘pledge their belief’ in the Australian Paralympic Team and donate to make sure the athletes can get to Sochi.
The organisation relies on public donations to send athletes to games, with six Paralympic athletes fronting the launch campaign created by MercerBell which directs the public to a website where they are able to donate as a one-off or set up regular donations.
MercerBell creative group head Simon Bloomfield told Mumbrella: “The APC came to us with the idea of marketing themselves in the lead up to Sochi and in the longer term with Brazil. There was a desire to start to raise the profile of the individual athletes and using a web platform to do that.”
The athletes fronting the campaign include gold winning Kurt Fearnley, Paralympic swimmer Ahmed Kelly and alpine skier Victoria Pendergast who is preparing for the Sochi 2014 Paralympic Winter games which starts in just 44 days.
“At the moment the site’s launching with six key athletes, the expectation is as we roll forward to introduce more athletes onto the web platform,” Bloomfield said.
“In the site itself we’re giving people the opportunity to support individual athletes, to support teams but at the end of the day the APC is trying to get as many athletes to the games as possible.”
The APC’s general manager for commercial Ian Laing told Mumbrella the challenge lay in finding new ways of fundraising.
“We have a huge amount of public support of our teams and our challenge financially is to turn that support into dollars,” he said.
“We’ve been fundraising for some years now and our challenge internally is to find some new and creative ways to fundraise outside the standard stuff we’ve done historically.”
On the work, Laing said: “It was a lovely moment when we – myself and the fundraiser team- all looked at each other when they explained the whole belief concept, we just kind of looked at each other and nodded and thought ‘great, they’ve absolutely nailed it’.
“The beauty of this campaign is that it shows the gritty reality of what these guys go through every day,” he added.
The charity aims to continue using the campaign in the lead-up to the Rio Summer Paralympics in 2016, with more athletes set to be featured.
“We’re going to be adding more athletes to the campaign, we’re looking at ways we can regionalise the campaign, for example looking at Geelong and looking at our athletes that are based around that area and challenging the area to get behind their local paralympian,” said Laing.
“People really want to get behind their local guy, so we think there’s some good mileage to be had there. We’re also going to extend across a variety of channels, we’re looking at direct response TV, we’re looking at some more traditional offline stuff.”
The website launch is supported by an extended media campaign, banners and eDMs.
All donations will go towards helping the APC’s pool of athletes “reach their full potential and achieve success at the Paralympic Games”.
Credits:
- MercerBell: Strategy, creative, donor comms & website development
- H+K Strategies: Communications and media
- PHD: Media planning & buying
- Steve Greenaway and Limehouse Creative: donated their photography and retouching services
- Michael Kennedy donated the image of Kurt Fearnley
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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