How Soccer Aid’s celebrity challenge raised £2 million for Unicef

• INCOME: Grow and diversify sustainable income streams, identifying new ways to fundraise outside the live match broadcast.
• BRAND: Strengthen the public’s connection of Soccer Aid to UNICEF. The challenge would reach and inspire a new audience to support UNICEF’s work for children.
• EXPERIENCE: Deliver a unique and unmissable campaign with nationwide engagement beyond the Soccer Aid host city.

Sam Thompson was identified and recruited for the challenge following his participation in Soccer Aid 2024. Sam had recently won ITV’s biggest entertainment format I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and was gaining audiences through his podcasts and broadcast roles, primarily on ITV and Hits Radio. He has an established network of high-profile friends and a growing profile, far beyond Made in Chelsea to wider UK public. Sam had also been moved to do more for our cause following his debut appearance for Soccer Aid and was especially motivated to find out more about our work and use his personal platforms to amplify our message. Looking at his profile, social metrics and talking to his team about his upcoming projects, we knew that Sam would enable us to reach far beyond our existing audience.

The Soccer Aid team developed the challenge concept: 'Sam Thompson’s Match Ball Mission'. Sam’s mission was to transport the match ball from 2024 host stadium Stamford Bridge, London to Old Trafford, Manchester in time for the 2025 match. It was clear, immediately understandable, and aligned with our brand. We were able to leverage the concept of Sam going the distance for children - both literally through the challenge, and figuratively, by raising money to support children around the world.

As part of his preparation, Sam visited Guatemala to see how money raised could help UNICEF’s work for children. Sam visited the Juego Limpio ‘Fair Play’ football programme in Sololá, where UNICEF-trained volunteers work with children aged 5 to 16, providing them with a safe space to play and using the power of sport to promote values ​​such as respect, equality, and teamwork. Many of the children Sam met live in poverty and have little access to quality sports facilities and mentorship. This experience touched Sam greatly, prepared him to talk about, and emotionally convey, the importance of our work.

Sam said: “Travelling to Guatemala and seeing UNICEF’s work first-hand supporting communities is something I will never forget in my entire life. The incredible football pitch there that I had the privilege of playing on was filled with joy, laughter and energy. I saw with my own eyes that UNICEF’s programmes are truly creating hope, happiness and a tangible safe space for kids to just be kids.”

This experience enabled Sam to talk about UNICEF’s work authentically throughout the Challenge and it allowed the campaign team to create social moments that linked strongly to the cause, like when he was shown Dany’s message from Guatemala, when he met a local school group and on the finish line.

We engaged multiple stakeholders in the Match Ball Mission; working with media partners such as Hits Radio, This Morning and Sam’s Podcast 'Staying Relevant' to showcase the challenge and amplify the narrative to wider audiences. A content strategy was built to creatively appeal to each stakeholder’s audience, whilst ensuring this laddered up to one cohesive story.

We built a comprehensive content plan across training, launch and live event phases with UNICEF UK and Soccer Aid teams producing and delivering all pre-event content in-house, alongside our partners. During the live event week, we built an expanded in-house crew, collaborating with partner crews to ensure we had the resource required to cover all content moments, both the planned and the reactive. This allowed us to flexibly capture the unexpected moments that helped drive the narrative and storytelling, such as Sam’s injury, and the terrible weather. Teams on the ground worked responsively to storytelling opportunities as they arose, ensuring these were adapted to suit owned, media partner and Sam’s own channels.

A key part of our strategy was to include a range of high-profile celebrities and influencers, who could amplify our reach through earned channels and to diversify and engage a new audience.

Across the campaign, these supporting influencers were selected against a core criteria – we identified personal heroes of Sam’s, Soccer Aid brand icons and those who would drive genuine and authentic emotion from both Sam and audience.

We knew that orchestrating these emotionally charged moments would be the best way to get the public rallying behind Sam, and to convert views into donations. The supporting talent all agreed to collab with Soccer Aid and UNICEF UK social media, enhancing engagement and utilising these platforms to their fullest potential.

The best example of this was the moment Sam’s best friend and podcast co-host Pete Wicks surprised him on Day Three. This moment went viral achieving over 5 million views and supported our theory that the best content would come from meaningful connections between Sam and his loved ones. This continued throughout the week, such as when Sam’s brother-in-law Ryan Libbey joined Sam on the road (literally) the day after his injury, or this phone call from fellow endurance challenge conqueror Jamie Laing. To diversify our content and the range of people who could support the challenge, we ensured we began challenge week with a bank of video messages from Sam’s famous heroes, which could be deployed flexibly to give Sam a boost and remind followers of his struggle – including Sir Stephen Fry, Olivia Colman, Sir Mo Farah, Bear Grylls and JLS.

Utilising the reach and influence of these celebrities was fundamental to the success of this campaign. We also worked collaboratively with our media partners throughout the creation and delivery of this content, which gave us credibility with the new audiences we were getting in front of.

Sam’s efforts underpinned the full content strategy and dynamic storytelling arc, and we saw the evidence of how significant his trip to Guatemala was to both motivate him to complete the challenge (even when at his lowest ebb) and anchoring messaging in all content back to the purpose of his mission – raising money for children. He was authentic, emotional, and at times completely broken, and we worked hard to capture it all.

Results:

• The campaign generated 152.6 million impressions, 9.6 million engagements and had an average engagement rate of 3.11%.
• Between 2-7th June (the week of the challenge) Soccer Aid and UNICEF UK Social Media Channels gained 80,268 new followers.
• Across solely UNICEF UK, Soccer Aid and Hits, the campaign achieved 63 million views on Instagram. This does not include collaborations lead by other accounts which would put the figure over 100 million views.
• The fundraising total reached over £2 million, which in part came from match-funding by two generous donors. 62% of donations from the public through the UNICEF donation page were generated from Instagram, with the highest spike when Pete Wicks surprised Sam.

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