#282 2024 · Dublin Samaritans / Droga5 Dublin · Non-profit / volunteer recruitmentproxy-test
Samaritans found its next volunteers by advertising at minute 26 of a podcast, the exact length of one of its own calls
the problem
A crisis helpline needed more volunteers but couldn't out-message 10,000 other charities for attention
background
Dublin Samaritans runs Ireland's only 24/7 emotional-support helpline and by 2024 faced rising call volumes alongside volunteer attrition, while competing for attention against more than 10,000 other Irish charities on marketing budgets none could match. Standard recruitment messaging — asking people to consider volunteering, describing the training and the impact — routinely lost to a widely held assumption that the role was too emotionally heavy to take on, which filtered out exactly the empathetic listeners the charity most needed.
The charity's own call data held an unused fact: the average Samaritans call runs about 26 minutes, matching the length of a typical podcast episode. Nobody had connected that duration to anything outside the call itself — it was an internal operations statistic, not something anyone thought to advertise against.
the move
With Droga5 Dublin, Samaritans bought inexpensive ad placements inside podcasts from the Headstuff network and other audio programming, timed to run at the 26-minute mark of listening — the same length as one of its calls — with hosts speaking directly to whoever was still listening that far in about becoming a volunteer, on the reasoning that a person who stays with one voice for 26 minutes has already shown the core skill Samaritans needed. A companion live storytelling event with Seanchoíche extended the same idea offline.
the payoff
On a media budget of about €2,500, the campaign drove roughly a 250-260% increase in volunteer applications versus the prior year (Effie Awards Europe's own case materials cite 260%; other coverage of the same campaign reports 250%), a 32% click-through rate from the landing page to the application form, and enough new recruits to fill two full training classes.
what came after
The campaign won a Gold Effie in Europe's Media Strategy & Idea category and a D&AD Wood Pencil, and is cited in both award circuits as a case study in reading an organization's own operational data for an audience insight instead of buying reach against a message everyone already tunes out.
filed under
references
- [1]Finding Samaritans amongst the keenest of listenersEffie Awards Europe, 2026effie-europe.com
- [2]The 26th Minute (D&AD Awards Archive)D&AD, 2025dandad.org