Dog beats kid in charity appeal ad

Harrison’s Fund, the charity which picked up a hatful of awards for its “I wish my son had cancer” campaign, has launched a test initiative designed to find out if people are more likely to donate to save a dog than a child.
The Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy charity’s latest campaign, again devised by AIS London, saw two versions of the same ad placed on MSN.co.uk, asking people to donate £5 to “save Harrison from a slow, painful death”.
However, one featured the image of a child, the other a picture of a dog. Both ads link through to a page on the charity’s website that explains the rationale for the campaign and asks for donations.
The charity also ran a print ad in the London Evening Standard, which used the same picture of a dog and the same slogan as the online ad, but said in the small print: “This isn’t Harrison by the way; this is a picture of a dog I found on the internet. Harrison is my eight-year-old son.”
So far the dog ad has received twice as many clicks as the picture of the real Harrison, the eight-year-old boy after whom the charity is named.
Alex Smith, Harrison’s father and the founder of the charity, says on the its website that public awareness of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy in the UK is below 1%. Dogs Trust, he says, raised £71m more than Harrison’s Fund in 2014. He says that animal charities do lots of good work, but his argument is that “in the real world, few of us would actually choose to save a dog over a dying child”.

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