Objectives

Giving Tuesday, the day after Cyber Monday, has become a critical opportunity for nonprofits to reach new donors – a day solely designed to push awareness and charitable giving for nonprofits worldwide. The team at ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, wanted to find a way to break out from all the cluttered messaging around that day and activate a unique concept to help the organization reach new audiences and achieve fundraising results.

By leveraging the organization’s partnership with YouTube’s Social Impact team and popular creators The Game Theorists, St. Jude was able to create a new, innovative way to reach donors of all ages through a first-of-its-kind YouTube masthead 9-hour livestream takeover.

Strategy and Execution

Since the beginning, St. Jude has connected directly with donors on TV and in the mail, as well as through the voice of widely admired celebrities. As media consumption habits change and evolve, St. Jude has innovated and evolved this model to engage new, younger and more diverse donors on YouTube. St. Jude’s strategic approach was three pronged:

1. Leverage YouTube as the platform of choice to tell long-form, emotionally powerful stories that highlight the courage and heroism of St. Jude patients, families and staff. 
2. Combine the power of St. Jude’s mission with the power of Google’s machine learning to reach the right prospective donors, at the right time, with the right message, at scale.
3. Partner with YouTube creators to drive awareness about St. Jude’s mission and connect authentically with millennial donors via a never-before done Giving Tuesday masthead livestream and videos on demand. 

Through innovative collaboration between St. Jude, YouTube's Social Impact team, Google, and YouTube creators The Game Theorists, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital executed a successful Giving Tuesday livestream, hosted live on the YouTube masthead, with incredible creators and compelling footage. Participating creator channels totaled 100M+ subscribers (one of the largest live collaborations on YouTube).

The high-visibility, along with guest influencers (The Try Guys, Markiplier, Colleen Ballinger, TheOdd1sOut, Vsauce3, Rosanna Pansino, SomethingElseYT, and Dawko) drove an astounding 170,000 concurrent viewers at its peak.

This unique positioning provided unparalleled brand exposure for St. Jude on the world's most popular video site, an engagement touchpoint with some of YouTube’s most popular content creators, partner integrations, while also driving viewers to donate on stjude.org.

Results

The Game Theorists (MatPat and Stephanie Patrick) raised more than $1.3 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital® during a nine-hour livestream on Giving Tuesday. The stream featured top YouTube creators who stopped by to help raise funds and spread awareness for the lifesaving mission of St. Jude: Finding cures. Saving children.® Overall, the YouTube community raised more than $1.3 million for St. Jude via the fundraiser on YouTube ($1.1 million on Giving Tuesday alone). It garnered 20,000 donations, from 18,000 unique donors. The livestream hit No. 1 on YouTube's Trending tab while it was live for 9.5 hours. The stream also received media attention and organic social coverage. Twenty-four hours after the stream ended, it was No. 2 on the Trending tab, and had amassed more than 13.4 million views. The livestream featured a partnership with Ocean Spray, who made a $50K match along with an exciting custom-built popular video game debut with an in-game rewards scavenger hunt that encouraged viewer participation and added up to a $500,000 bonus donation. 

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is leading the way the world understands, treats and defeats childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food – because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.

Media