WaterAid
The World’s Driest Christmas Dinner
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This was a creative strategy project where the role of strategy was to find a way for a charity fundraiser to cut through at Christmas.
Today 1 in 10 people around the world still don’t have safe and reliable access to clean water.
WaterAid is a charity working to ensure everyone, everywhere has clean water, decent toilets, and good hygiene and relies heavily on donations from everyday people across the UK.
As awful as the waterless reality is, a lack of clean water can feel abstract to British people when clean water is always just a tap away.
Special London developed a new ad campaign to remind the UK just how critical water is to our lives.
WaterAid wanted to bring that message to life at Christmas, in a way that raised awareness of the fundraiser and delivered brand fame, at the most contested fundraising period of the year.
MHP Group’s Polarisation Tracker gave me two key insights:
The public care much more about home affairs than foreign aid at the moment
But pitting “home” vs “away” is hugely polarising in and of itself
If we wanted to appeal to the widest possible base at Christmas, we needed to build our campaign on shared ideas, symbols, and rituals of British Christmas. We needed to make the issue of water insecurity feel close to home.
This led to my strategic idea:
Take the water out of Christmas
This unlocked the creative idea – The Driest Christmas Dinner Ever, a fully dehydrated Christmas dinner, every drop of water removed, available to purchase through the WaterAid Shop.
We built a campaign across four integrated channels:
The news story — media outreach centred on the dehydrated dinner's launch, supported by original consumer research on low awareness of global water poverty and culturally resonant angles around the divisiveness of Christmas dinner traditions
Media and influencer seeding — 30 media titles and 50 influencers and content creators received meals, all secured entirely organically. Participants included Paloma Faith, Big Zuu and Vanessa Feltz, many of whom explained the issue directly and donated themselves, demonstrating genuine engagement rather than transactional posting
Pro-bono OOH — Mischief created advertising and secured pro-bono digital out-of-home placements across multiple high-footfall London locations, including Waitrose in Kensington, deliberately juxtaposing festive abundance with extreme scarcity
The WaterAid Shop — the dinner was available to purchase directly, with a clear donation call to action embedded across all coverage and social content
72
pieces of coverage including 20 broadcast hits across TV and radio
96%
key message penetration and 94% of coverage including links to donate means the creative message resonated with media audience,
106%
increase in donations vs non-campaigning period means we brought in £388,000 at Christmas