Whitelion showed Australia the scale of youth homelessness by making the country aware of something else that’s just as invisible as the young on our streets: the payphone.

It’s easy to ignore 46,000 homeless youth. It’s much harder to ignore 15,391 payphones ringing out at once.

By reaching all 15,391 payphones across Australia at the same time, our phone messages raised $76,000 for Whitelion.

STRATEGY

Our strategy was to dramatise the apathy that everyday Australians hold towards at-risk youth.

We found the vehicle to dramatise this apathy with something that’s been in our peripheral but we simply hadn’t realised it before: public payphones.

Public payphone are everywhere, but we completely ignore them. Because we no longer see the value in them.

Making these payphones seen and heard once more was a metaphorical way to shed light on other aspects of our community that we’ve grown apathetic towards.

The Loudest Call is a challenge to everyday Australians – to finally hear and see the 46,000 at-risk youth worthy of support.

EXECUTION

Helping a young homeless Aussie call 15,391 payphones seemed easy. At least to start with.

The first challenge was getting 15,391 payphone numbers.

At first we thought we’d have to walk to every payphone to find their numbers. But thanks to an obscure Australian law, every payphone in Australia must have a publicly available number.

Then there were the Australian spam laws. Which we found out don’t apply to public phones. Lucky.

Actually making a phone message from young homeless Aussies was straight forward. Apart from testing the volume - which we found is compressed by the phone company. After a bit of experimentation in the field we got the volume right.

Then there was automation. Which was more complicated than we imagined. But thanks to some smart people we were able to figure out how to legally call 15,391 payphones in Australia without getting kicked off the network.

RESULTS

1. Demonstrate and raise awareness of the scale of at-risk youth.

2. Raise donations with a limited budget of $3775.

AWARENESS:

There’s never been something like this staged by another charity or brand. So, there was literally no benchmark to be able to compare ourselves to. Although, given that we were dealing with a legacy technology that most people no longer utilise (less than 2% of Australians even opt to use public payphones for emergency assistance), we achieved an average pickup rate of over 19%. An incredible result.

While the average listen rate was 9.7 seconds, there were up to 750 calls that were listened to for more than 59 seconds – that’s the entire duration of our message.

DONATIONS:

The call to action for The Loudest Call was to head to whitelion.org.au to make a donation.

With a tiny $3775 production budget, the campaign raised an incredible $76000.