Overview

For many years, DeafKidz International has flown under-the-radar, doing amazing work to help deaf children around the world, but not doing anything to shout about it and raise awareness of the horrendous challenges deaf children face. The charity wanted to change that this year, using Deaf Awareness Week to demonstrate its role in reducing the risk and vulnerability of deaf children in some of the most impoverished countries in the world. However, with little budget and even less time (only a month before Deaf Awareness Week), we had to come up with something, and fast.

Strategy

Our challenge was the difficulty in making people care about the plight of those in countries far away, especially when they are already bombarded by multiple charity campaigns at home. We had to find a way to make their plight relatable to a broad and hearing audience for DeafKidz to be able to cut through.

Thanks to the pandemic, everyone was spending a lot more time on video calls from home, each one with its own communication frustrations, including the predictable moment when someone tries to speak on mute. We quickly realised that it was these frustrations that were the perfect parallel to the extreme frustrations deaf children in impoverished countries face every day, where no one knows sign language and their entire community is effectively ‘on mute’, permanently. We saw this an opportunity to raise awareness of the challenges faced by deaf children globally.

Campaign objective: raise awareness of DeafKidz International for the first time

·        10% increase in social followers

·        10,000 combined engagements on social posts

·        50,000 impressions across Facebook & Twitter

·        5,000 views of campaign video

·        10 pieces of media coverage

Idea & Method

We took the catchphrase of the last year – “You’re on mute” – and flipped it on its head. We developed an integrated campaign that asked everyone to donate to DeafKidz International whenever the phrase was mentioned.

We got creative with technology and built a “You’re on Mute Detector”, a fun and interactive tool for people to take to their business meetings and digital social gatherings. Using Google’s voice recognition technology, the tool detected whenever the phrase “you’re on mute” was mentioned and prompted a donation at the end of each call based on the total figure.

For those who had tweeted their frustrations around people being on mute during video calls (of which there were over 70k mentions) we responded with our campaign video. The video featured deaf children from Zambia who used sign language to initially talk about the frustrations of people being on mute on video calls, but then how that for children like themselves, there was no easy way to click a button to unmute their community.

Additional elements of the campaign included:

·        Social media community management, including paid and organic social across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as well as hijacking the #DeafAwarenessWeek hashtag with a call to share and get involved.

·        17 Instagram collaborations, teaming up with influencers from within the deaf community who all agreed to support the campaign for no fee.

·        Radio spots, featuring Steve Crump, Chairman of DeafKidz International. who spoke about the campaign and how the charity helped vulnerable deaf children by teaching sign language and unmuting their communities.

·        Outdoor media, secured at no cost to the charity, featuring our visually-arresting design with various icons including the sign language for ‘thank you’.

All our activity linked back to our unmutetodonate.com site, where people could find out more about the charity’s efforts as well as downloading assets to turn their next call’s ‘you’re on mutes’ into donations for the charity.

Outcome

The increase in awareness of the charity and the growth of its community during Deaf Awareness Week was significant:

OWN CHANNELS

·        44% increase in Instagram followers (KPI: +10%)

·        570% increase in Twitter mentions and 516% increase in profile visits

·        1,000 engagements on Instagram and 96,300 impressions across Facebook & Twitter, an increase of 1,257% from the previous month

EARNED MEDIA

·        416 pieces of coverage across broadcast, consumer, and trade titles – with a combined reach of 9.5 million (KPI: 10)

·        100% of which included the campaign CTA to visit the ‘unmute to donate’ website

INFLUENCER OUTREACH

·        21,000+ engagements on posts (KPI: 10,000)

·        445,000+ reach through influencer network

PAID ENGAGEMENT

·        50,562 total impressions across carousel and video ads (KPI: 50,000)

·        14,900 plays of our video (KPI: 5,000)

·        2.2% click through rate to the website

AND OVER 3,000 YOU’RE ON MUTES DETECTED, AND STILL COUNTING!