BIG BROTHER BIG SISTER

Toyota is all about building a better world. In 2022, they became the corporate sponsor of the Big Brother, Big Sister programme as a way of doing just that. Partnering with Foróige, the programme pairs young people with a ‘big brother’ or ‘big sister’, i.e. someone who can act as a role model for them.

While there were a lot of ‘littles’ looking for role models, there was a serious lacking of ‘bigs’ to take them on. Our mission? To create a campaign that gets as many adults involved as possible with a particular focus on young men. Mission, accepted.

We began by looking at the research, 80% of adults didn’t know about the programme and those who would perhaps like to be involved felt it would be too much commitment and they didn’t have enough to offer. Neither of these things are true, so we decided to address these problems. We needed to tell adults, male and female, that they could change a young person’s life with just an hour of their time a week, no qualifications required.

We created a highly targeted digital media strategy. In an Irish media first, we use Sky Shoppable targeted digital TV to mosaic profiles using a QR code for response. Sounds high-tech, doesn’t it? It is. We went all in, targeting these people everywhere we knew they were, social media, websites, digital audio, the whole sh’bang.

And… it worked! Over 12 weeks late 2022, we got 1,144 people expressing an interest. Compared to that same period in 2019 (20/21 were Covid and therefore an inaccurate representation) when just 107 were recruited.

There was also a 37% increase for men, and interest in counties that had never gotten involved before. Of the 1,144 interested people, 338 are already through the vetting stage ready to be paired with their mentee.

Overall, we did exactly what we set out to do, more mentors for young people all over Ireland.