Winners: The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention - The Fight to Stop Suicide and Con Edison - Gas Safety Awareness
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention - The Fight to Stop Suicide
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention set out to spread the message that "You Can #StopSuicide" for National Suicide Prevention Week, Sept 6-12, 2015.
By way of background, The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention conducted a public opinion poll with Harris Interactive, and the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, of more than 2,000 US adults to assess perceptions about mental health and suicide awareness.
They found that nearly 90 percent of Americans value mental health and physical health equally, yet about one-third find mental health care inaccessible, and more than four in 10 see cost as a barrier to treatment for most people.
Other results included the fact that most adults (93 percent) would do something if someone close to them was thinking about suicide.
The foundation used both traditional media and social media channels to push the results of the public opinion poll, but most importantly, it used National Suicide Prevention Week to raise awareness for suicide prevention and the role that every day Americans can play in the fight against suicide.
During National Suicide Prevention Week, the foundation reached people through multiple blog posts, social media outreach, Twitter chats and through a long list of national partner organizations, in which it contributed blog posts to their websites or weekly newsletters.
Some of the partners it worked with included the Association for Behavioral Health and Wellness, the Huffington Post, Mental Health America, NAMI, Parenting Tips2Go, the Treatment Advocacy Center, TWLOHA and WebMD.
As a result of its efforts, the foundation increased followers at three times the rate on Twitter, and at twice the rate on Facebook. Its posts on Facebook were shared over 10K times, received more than 12K clicks, and reached more than 585K people.
Con Edison - Gas Safety Awareness
After a devastating gas explosion in East Harlem killed eight people in 2014, Con Edison learned that many customers smelled gas prior to the explosion, but never realized that they needed to report it to the gas company or 911.
To better target its message on social media about the importance of reporting gas odors, Con Edison focused on the most popular languages spoken in its service area: Spanish, English, Chinese and Korean.
The goal was to reach as many people as possible, in the way they wanted to be communicated with. Keeping that top of mind, Con Edison created a paid, targeted, multilingual gas safety campaign on Facebook that focused on the importance of gas safety and calling if you smell gas.
Con Edison also produced a short, animated video in-house with employee voiceovers that would auto-play in each language, to deliver its gas safety message.
The videos had three separate gas safety messages to accompany the video in each respective language (for example, “If you smell natural gas, act fast to stay safe”). With the help of Con Edison’s social media agency, this was set-up through Facebook’s advertising platform. Videos were targeted to play automatically on Con Edison customers’ pages who self-identified in their personal Facebook profile as being Spanish, Chinese or Korean-speaking.
The multilingual gas safety campaign was Con Edison’s most successful social media campaign to date, garnering 726,045 total video views (with an original view prediction of 30,000); a total reach of 598,456; and 3,062,251 total impressions.
Honorable Mentions:
• 92nd Street Y, United Nations Foundation, Coyne PR, Edelman, Fenton, FleishmanHillard, Havas PR North America, Sunshine Sachs, Turner 4d, Weber Shandwick - #GivingTuesday: The Day the World Gave Back - #GivingTuesday: The Day the World Gave Back
• Experian - Improving Financial Literacy One Chat at a Time
• JetBlue Airways - Soar with Reading
• Prudential - #20StoriesOfStrength
• Chevron Richmond Refinery with Singer Associates, Inc. - The Richmond Standard
• The Home Depot Foundation - Team Depot Celebrates #GivingTuesday