Closer Than You Think
Child Focus
Issue 44 | September 2017
Agency
These Days
Creative Team
Creative Directors Pieter Staes, Manuel Ostyn Creation Jolien Tuyteleers, Kate Bellefroid
Production Team
Production Design Directors Sebastien Greffe, Max Heirbaut Design Dorien Wendelen, Sarah Herlant DTP Anja Van den Broeck Producer Bruno Dejonghe Film Production Static Films
Other Credits
Account Team Seppe Dogge, Hélène Bouillet Strategy Julie Bogaerts Social Chloé Van Elsen, Margot Bracke Client Contact Dirk Depover
Date
June 2017
Background
Child Focus wanted a presence in the run-up to the International Day of Missing Children on May 25th.
Their website featured the photos and details of missing children. Ideally, people would visit the site and share posts about children who had disappeared. But there was a problem. Most people had no personal knowledge of an abducted or runaway child. They said: "It never happens in my neighborhood." And "I don't know these families."
Idea
The one thing that would always convince people to share was if they'd known the child or their family personally.
So, a social experiment was created where a group of people was confronted by the short distance between them and a missing child.
Based on the concept of Six Degrees of Separation (Stanley Milgram, Yale University) the video showed how two complete strangers were linked in a chain of just five (or fewer) people.
Each of them was closer to a distraught family and a missing child than they thought.
Several famous Belgians, including Chelsea goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois and Prime Minister Charles Michel, were targeted with a personal movie on Twitter, showing their personal connections to a missing child. They all retweeted the campaign.
TV, radio, print, and posters featuring the chains of real people helped drive traffic to the site.
Results
The campaign appeared in the national news and in several talk shows.
The Child Focus Facebook page got 16,000 additional followers (+23%) in a few days.
Shares of missing children search messages rose +244% on average. Total reach of the messages went up +373% (engagement +333%).
After the campaign launched, almost two million people were reached within 24 hours when a child was abducted. It was shared ten times more than usual. The girl was found safe and sound and a suspect taken into custody.
Our Thoughts
There is a simple truth here. If we have no personal connection to tragedy, then we can, and do, simply refuse to take an interest in it. Life is too short.
So, that's the dilemma for so many charities. In many ways those appeals that say 'Your €10 donation can feed a family for a month' are too rational. How do you create an emotional response sufficiently personal for people to want to help?
The six degrees of separation thing is a hook that almost always stimulates curiosity. How far and to whom might your five connections take you?
Over 250,000 children go missing in the EU each year. Let's hope this campaign helps reunite many of them with their families.