FCB Canada’s first order of business as the new creative AOR for SickKids will be helping the foundation celebrate its 150th birthday and kickstart a robust fundraising campaign for next year.
SickKids Foundation announced on Monday that it named FCB Canada its new creative AOR after a long-standing partnership with Cossette, which began in 2015.
Kate Torrance, vice-president and head of brand, content and communications with SickKids, tells strategy the 150th anniversary will be FCB’s “first project in 2025.”
“We’re also embarking on a new fundraising chapter,” Torrance says of the early stages of FCB’s partnership. “Starting at the end of 2025, we’ll be launching our next big fundraising campaign. With that, we really need to reinvigorate the marketplace again.”
In 2023, SickKids completed a record-setting fundraising campaign, receiving $1.7 billion to build a state-of-the-art hospital in downtown Toronto. The new fundraising campaign will support Precision Child Health, which was soft-launched under Cossette last year, Torrance says.
The reason SickKids sought and landed a new creative AOR, despite all the success the foundation had with Cossette, was due to a couple factors, Torrance adds. One was the procurement review policy that SickKids follows, which was “delayed as long as we could,” Torrance says.
“We’re a charity, and our agency partners contribute a ton philanthropically,” she says. “Because it’s donor dollars, we implemented this procurement policy to ensure that we are accountable for spending donor dollars really efficiently. That was the catalyst for the review. We invited Cossette to participate, but they declined.”
Cossette was the agency behind the “SickKids VS” brand platform that was introduced in October 2016. The agency also helped SickKids increase its revenue to more than $200 million per year, the foundation said in a press release.
“It has been an honour to contribute to such a meaningful cause, and we are deeply humbled by the impact we’ve made together in supporting their mission, Kathy McGuire, SVP and GM of Cossette, said in the release. “Now it’s time for us to pass the torch.”
As part of passing that torch, FCB will pick up Cossette’s “SickKids VS” brand platform, which Torrance says will remain.
“We liken ‘VS’ to Nike’s ‘Just Do It,'” she says. “That’s endured for 30 years and so many different agencies touched it. We’re approaching it in a similar way, and we know FCB will maintain the equity we’ve built but find a fresh way of bringing it to market that sets us apart.”
