SickKids Foundation's Be a Light campaign, created by Cossette in Canada in 2021, reframes pediatric illness as a fight against darkness to recruit monthly
SickKids Foundation Turns Darkness Into a Donor Call With Be a Light
Be a Light is a 2021 Canadian public service campaign created by Cossette for the SickKids Foundation, using a light-versus-darkness metaphor drawn directly from patient families to inspire monthly donations toward the construction of a new Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
The campaign launched in Canada on October 11, 2021, and ran through December of that year, as reported by Campaign Canada and confirmed by Cossette. It represents the sixth iteration of the SickKids VS fundraising platform, which Cossette built for the foundation beginning in 2016, according to Cossette and Strategy Online. The core of the campaign is a 60-second hero film, supported by 15-second cutdown videos, print executions, out-of-home placements on Toronto billboards and transit shelters, online video, digital display, and paid and organic social media. A two-and-a-half-minute extension film was also produced, though it was not immediately made broadly available to the public, per reporting by LBBOnline.
The campaign's central proposition is both emotional and structural. Where earlier SickKids VS work leaned into combative, high-energy imagery of children fighting disease, Be a Light shifts register. The metaphor emerged directly from conversations with patient families, who described receiving a diagnosis as a dark cloud descending on their world. The SickKids community — hospital staff, researchers, patients, and donors — is positioned as the ray of light that pushes that darkness back. In Canada, a country with a deeply held public identity around universal healthcare and community support, this framing carries specific cultural resonance. The call to action is direct: become a monthly donor, and become a source of light. Media planning and buying for the campaign was handled by OMD Canada, according to Campaign Canada and LBBOnline. The Clapboard Score for Be a Light is 63 out of 100.
SickKids Foundation anchored Be a Light in qualitative research gathered directly from the families it serves. The light-and-darkness metaphor was not a creative invention — it was a documented pattern. As Executive Creative Director Craig McIntosh of Cossette noted to LBBOnline: the consistency of that metaphor across different families pointed to just how all-consuming a childhood diagnosis can be, and that shared language gave the campaign its emotional authority.
Strategically, Be a Light represents a deliberate evolution within the SickKids VS platform. According to Cossette and Strategy Online, the VS platform had raised approximately one billion dollars and recruited a significant base of monthly donors since its 2016 launch. By 2021, per thecreativesroom.com, the SickKids VS fundraising platform had raised approximately one point two billion dollars, reaching ninety-two percent of a one point three billion dollar target for the new hospital. That context shaped the campaign's tone: the urgency was real, but the register shifted from battle cry to invitation. The ask — become a monthly donor — required sustained emotional connection rather than a single transactional moment.
In Canada, the nonprofit advertising landscape was growing in 2021. Canadian nonprofit digital advertising spending increased by nineteen percent that year, according to thecreativesroom.com, and nonprofits spent an average of six cents in digital advertising for every dollar raised online, per the same source. Against that backdrop, SickKids Foundation — operating in a competitive charitable environment that includes peers such as the Children's Miracle Network and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada — made a calculated choice to invest in long-form emotional narrative rather than short-cycle conversion tactics. The documentary and social experiment framing of Be a Light reflects that strategic patience, building donor identity rather than simply soliciting a gift.
Mark Zibert directed Be a Light for production company Scouts Honour, bringing a documentary sensibility to a campaign built on real human testimony. That choice is central to the work. Because the light-and-darkness metaphor originated with patient families rather than copywriters, the film's credibility depended on allowing that authenticity to show through the frame. Zibert's approach, as documented by LBBOnline and thecreativesroom.com, treats the subject with restraint — the visual language of light is literal and symbolic simultaneously, without tipping into melodrama.
Craig McIntosh, Executive Creative Director at Cossette, described the creative intent to LBBOnline: the goal was to illustrate what childhood illness actually looks like from the inside, and the consistency of the families' responses — all reaching independently for the same metaphor of darkness — validated both the insight and the approach. McIntosh stated that light was positioned explicitly as the counterpoint to darkness, and that SickKids itself embodies that counterpoint. That conceptual clarity gives the 60-second hero film a coherence that shorter executions can leverage: the 15-second cutdowns and social assets function as fragments of the same emotional world rather than standalone messages.
The campaign's multi-channel architecture — spanning television, online video, out-of-home across Toronto, print, and paid and organic social — was designed to surround the audience rather than intercept them at a single touchpoint. Toronto's out-of-home placements, including billboard and transit-shelter formats, brought the light metaphor into public physical space, reinforcing the community dimension of the campaign's message. According to Campaign Canada, the campaign was submitted to Cossette's archive by Daphné Cousineau. Production credits for post-production on Be a Light are not fully documented in publicly available sources.
No verified campaign-specific performance data for Be a Light — such as donation uplift, reach, or conversion rates attributable solely to the 2021 campaign — is publicly available. What the public record does establish is the cumulative strength of the platform within which it sits. According to thecreativesroom.com, the broader SickKids VS fundraising platform had recruited more than one million monthly donors by 2021, and had achieved a reported two hundred and eighty-nine percent return on marketing investment across four campaigns, per Warc. These figures reflect the platform's sustained effectiveness, not Be a Light in isolation, but they establish the standard against which the 2021 work was produced.
Structurally, Be a Light demonstrates several features associated with durable fundraising creative. The metaphor is singular and transferable — it works equally across a 60-second film, a billboard, and a social post. The call to action (become a monthly donor) is embedded within an identity proposition (be a source of light) rather than presented as a transactional request, which research consistently associates with higher donor lifetime value. The documentary register reduces the perception of advertising artifice, which is particularly consequential in Canada's charitable sector, where donor trust is a primary acquisition driver. According to thecreativesroom.com, the SickKids VS platform by 2021 had raised approximately one point two billion dollars toward a one point three billion dollar hospital target — providing the campaign with a genuinely close and tangible goal to communicate. That proximity to a completed mission is itself a persuasive asset that Be a Light was positioned to capitalise on.
Be a Light is a 2021 Canadian public service campaign created by Cossette for SickKids Foundation. It uses a light-versus-darkness metaphor drawn from patient family testimony to recruit monthly donors toward funding a new Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. The campaign ran from October through December 2021 across film, out-of-home, digital, and social channels.
Cossette created Be a Light for SickKids Foundation. Cossette has served as SickKids' creative agency of record since 2015, according to Cossette and Strategy Online. Director Mark Zibert shot the hero film through production company Scouts Honour, while OMD Canada handled media planning and buying, as reported by Campaign Canada and LBBOnline.
SickKids VS is a fundraising platform Cossette launched for SickKids Foundation in 2016. Be a Light is its sixth iteration. The platform had raised approximately one point two billion dollars by 2021, per thecreativesroom.com. Be a Light evolved the platform's tone from combative imagery toward a community-centred message of hope and shared light.
The metaphor came directly from patient families, not from creative brainstorming. According to Craig McIntosh, Executive Creative Director at Cossette, as quoted by LBBOnline, multiple families independently described receiving a diagnosis as a dark cloud descending on their world, making the metaphor an authentic expression of lived experience rather than a constructed advertising concept.
Be a Light ran across television, online video, out-of-home placements including Toronto billboards and transit shelters, print, digital display, and paid and organic social media, according to Campaign Canada and LBBOnline. A 60-second hero film anchored the campaign, supported by 15-second cutdowns and a two-and-a-half-minute extended film.
Be a Light holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The campaign demonstrates strong conceptual clarity and authentic emotional grounding through its documentary approach and patient-family-sourced metaphor. No campaign-specific verified performance metrics are publicly available, though the broader SickKids VS platform reported a two hundred and eighty-nine percent return on marketing investment across four campaigns, per Warc.
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