Oaktree: Live Below the Line

Oaktree is Australia’s largest youth-led organisation. They’re on a mission to end extreme poverty.

Live Below the Line is Oaktree’s annual signature campaign, alongside The Global Poverty Project. The campaign asks people to eat below the poverty line for five days in a bid to raise awareness and funds that will assist 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty.

Oaktree’s followers sign up and donate money on the Live Below the Line website. They wanted to make it easier for their followers to donate money and sign up. The old process was slow, and there were multiple logins. Licensing fees were taking away a high percentage of donations.

They had a vision to create a user-friendly website with social networking capabilities - and a better fundraising platform, increasing participants and donation amounts.

Oaktree chose to partner with ThoughtWorks, and set a challenge to meet an aggressive deadline.

Other consultancies said it wasn’t possible in three months. In 2011, we raised no funds by the go live date of Easter, in 2012 we used continuous design and delivery to raise $170,402 by the same date.

Daniel Lewis Toakley

Live Below The Line Campaign Manager

In just three months, ThoughtWorks custom built a cutting edge fundraising and community platform that allowed users to share and donate via social media - contributing to the most successful year ever for Live Below the Line.

Thanks to the new platform, Oaktree raised over $1.9 million in 2012, and over $2.1 million in 2013. This is a 45% increase from the 2011 campaign. Oaktree no longer have to pay expensive licensing and donation fees – meaning they can serve a growing base of donors, at a fraction of the cost.

What’s next?

Oaktree has now shifted their focus to tighter integration with their customer relationship management – making it easier to improve the effectiveness of their targeted campaigns.