Vienna, 6 October 2020. Hat-trick for Doctors Without Borders. With three awards in the categories “Online Campaign of the Year”, “Spot of the Year” and “Innovation of the Year”, Doctors Without Borders was the big winner at the most important award ceremony in the fundraising industry, the Fundrainsing Award 2020, on Monday at the Europahaus Vienna. Doctors Without Borders received support from the Viennese performance marketing agency Corvis, which won with its online campaign “Happiness is contagious” and the spot “You are not alone”.

Online Campaign of the Year: “Happiness is contagious”

In 2019, Corvis faced the challenge of implementing the first integrated cross-channel campaign for new donors online. In the following online campaign “Happiness is contagious”, Corvis used a three-phase model to encourage new donors to finance international missions at Christmas, the New Year and during the pandemic. Corvis CEO Markus Siuda: “First of all online communication was rebuilt with a focus on emotional, high-interaction social media ads as part of a full-funnel strategy. Then we increased attention and engagement with organic Facebook posts and a series of videos. Finally, we led all interacting users with different, informative ad creatives to a specially developed donation page. Retargeting and ongoing campaign optimization ultimately led to new contacts that were successively converted to online donors. The newly acquired donors were eventually built up into returning donors through targeted email marketing.” This sophisticated strategy was crowned with success. In this way, not only new and younger target groups could be tapped, but also the number of new and permanent donors doubled in the comparative period.

Spot of the Year: “You’re not alone”

Already at the beginning of the pandemic, Doctors Without Borders registered a high need among the population for medical and psychological care. Under the title “You are not alone”, the spot was the prelude to a video series for psychological help during the lockdown. The spot was produced from existing footage shot during a deployment in Hong Kong. The concept and production (editing, dubbing) for the “You are not alone” series were created in Austria in collaboration with Corvis and director Paul Schwind. The spot was distributed exclusively via high-reach channels such as ORF, Pro7Sat1 Austria, RTL, Youtube and Facebook.