The Challenge 

According to the latest Government figures, collected in the autumn of 2020 and published in February 2021, 2688 people are estimated to be sleeping rough on a single night in the UK. With homelessness on the rise and in the middle of a national Lockdown, we partnered with Wellington Square Shopping Centre and Castlegate Shopping Centre to ‘Keep Stockton Warm’.

The Solution

The Keep Stockton Warm initiative launched on Monday 18th January 2021 and invited the residents of Stockton and surrounding areas to donate their spare winter coats, gloves, hats and scarves to be rehomed with local charity A Way Out.

The How

In this project, Toolbox Marketing was responsible for:

• Media
• Design
• Social media
• PR

A large bespoke donation box was created where people were able to drop off their coats and winter accessories whilst visiting the centres for their essential shopping.  The donation box and and an empty unit window were both vinyled with graphics to explain the promotion and to raise awareness of the services that A Way Out provides.  

To launch the campaign we displayed coats, hats and scarves around both Castlegate and Wellington Square, each item had a tag on it saying ‘Free if you need me!’.

The Results

The original aim was to collect 150 coats in total, we quickly increased the target to 500 coats after the first week of collecting donations.  This target was totally smashed and an amazing total of 847 items were collected.   This is an impressive +465% above the original objective and +69% above the revised target. 

The Keep Stockton Warm campaign aimed to collect items of winter clothing to support local charity A Way Out and raise awareness of the services that the charity provides and the people that they support in the community. As the campaign was so successful and collected so many coats, there were more than enough coats for A Way Out.  This allowed us to also help another two local charities: 

• The Moses Project 
• One Community Link