Ronald McDonald House Charities Canada (RMHC) is marking 10 years of the Happy Meal donation program with a one-day effort designed to thank Canadians for their continued support.
For the last decade, 10 cents from every Happy Meal purchase has gone directly to RMHC, an organization that provides a place for out-of-town families to stay while their sick child is being treated at a nearby hospital.
On Sept. 17, each meal ordered between 6 a.m. and early afternoon was served in a Happy Meal Box that included a handwritten thank you note from a family, parent or child that had spent time in one of RMHC’s 14 locations across the country.
“Families are always saying thank you…it just grew organically from there. With them thanking us, and us thinking, well it’s not us who we need to thank, its Canadians, its McDonalds customers. They’re the ones who have really enabled this and so we just decided to pay it forward and share it with them,” said Cathy Loblaw, president and CEO of RMCH.
A video documenting the surprised diner’s reactions, along with footage of a few RMHC families creating the notes, was released Friday on RMHC’s YouTube, Facebook and Twitter pages. Canadians are being encouraged to share both the video and their thank you notes online using #RMHCThankYou.
The organization has also created a microsite, RMHCThankYou.ca. Visitors to the site can check out all the notes (more than 75 were received) and delve deeper into the stories of several RMHC families. Since the effort was meant to be a surprise, RMHC didn’t promote it, but since launching the video Friday, is supporting both the video and the site via banner ads and social.
Founded in 1981, more than 23,000 Canadian families spent time in RMHC houses last year.
RMHC worked with its creative agency Cossette on the effort and OMD on the media buy. National PR and Weber Shandwick were tasked with PR, while Tribal handled digital.
