Championing CSR in the IT industry

Overview

Byte Night is the IT industry’s annual sleep out in support of Action for Children. Each year, hundreds of individuals and teams from across the business community spend a night together exposed to the elements in a bid to raise sponsorship and awareness for Action for Children’s vital work.

After 11 years of steady growth, the challenge for Byte Night was how to grow the community and increase the fundraising power of the events – and re-energise the brand around the projects the charity had activated. We were approached to carry out two functions for the charity – firstly to join the board and secondly to act as lead marketing agency. This triggered a programme of support and campaigns that would continue for over 5 years.

Client

Byte Night

What we delivered?

We created a phased programme of annual campaigns that crystalised the Byte Night brand and demonstrated its value back into community. In parallel, we also supported the launch of additional sleep-outs that expanded the network from 3 to 8 events. We developed and managed all aspects of the offline, online, outdoor and sleeper recruitment programme. This extended to social communities, strategic sponsor support campaigns and website development. The emotive headlines and themes acted as a rally call to a number of segments in the IT industry. Discrete streams of marketing were aimed at CIO, IT operations, supply chain and professional advisor constituencies.

What did the campaign achieve?

In the years supporting Byte Night (all of which were in the recession), We have helped deliver a threefold increase to the sleeper community – and doubled annual fundraising to over £1m per year. Byte Night is now the largest event-based charity supported by the technology industry.