A-B’s tradition of producing emergency drinking water is admirable, but it’s not new. What made this year’s effort unique was an innovative storytelling approach, in the context of a broader national story. Our Community First strategy prioritized those who mattered most in this national dialogue: the impacted residents of Florida, Houston, Louisiana, California and Puerto Rico.

To drive coverage and social conversation, as part of our creative strategy we elevated the surprise factor of the country’s biggest brewer canning water rather than beer. In a year defined by division, these bold acts of kindness – A-B employees rolling up their sleeves to help Americans in need – offered the country a moment to come together, celebrating the companies who put the community before their bottom line.

When Hurricane Harvey hit, we assembled a team to tailor content for all audience groups, coordinate interview requests and respond to a huge volume of media inquiries.

Our media tactics focused on the practical aspects of our content: keeping affected communities informed of where, when and how to access water, while maintaining a humble tone throughout. Our storytelling and tactical approach drove massive coverage and amplification of A-B’s efforts, both in states affected by Harvey and across the nation, as the novel story of A-B brewing water instead of beer took hold.

In September, we continued our work for Hurricane Irma in Florida. Then again for Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria and California’s wildfires, securing a continued steady drumbeat of media coverage. We evolved our narrative to emphasize the efforts of A-B employees, further humanizing the program and keeping A-B’s efforts in the spotlight even as the natural story arc declined.

Our campaign made A-B’s water donations program one of the highest-visibility programs in company history. The results far exceeded our goals, and successfully positioned A-B on a national scale as a leading corporate citizen using innovative methods and leveraging its strengths to help communities in their times of need – exactly what our Community First approach was designed to achieve.

Our earned media efforts, without any paid support, resulted in 1,316 total stories on traditional platforms, including in virtually every top-tier outlet, totaling over 1.24 billion potential impressions. The program delivered over 620,100 social media conversations – six times greater than any previous A-B water donation effort. The program trended nationally on both Facebook and Twitter, driving the highest-ever follower growth on A-B’s social channels and among the highest-ever social chatter.

Across all channels, sentiment was overwhelmingly positive and message pull-through remained extremely high.

A-B engaged numerous stakeholder populations with real-time updates throughout the campaign; employees fundraised following A-B’s internal communications, and community partner charities joined localized distribution efforts. Countless federal, state and local officials shared their views of A-B as an exemplary corporate citizen, through social and earned media, and at events.

A-B’s water donation program has since become the A-B initiative with the highest favorable impact on national opinion elites, eclipsing all of A-B’s sustainability and military support programs. The program even helped inspire Budweiser to devote its 2018 Super Bowl commercial to the water donations program, featuring real employees from the Georgia Brewery!

Anheuser-Busch’s (A-B) emergency water donations program is about more than earning nation-wide media coverage and social conversation; the primary purpose has always been helping people in need. The program has been a mainstay but, last year an innovative storytelling approach focusing on employee’s efforts, and a new holistic “Community First” communications approach, took the program to an entirely new level.

The program – developed collaboratively by us and A-B’s corporate communications team – is a best-in-class case study of the impact a bold corporate CSR activation can have on a company’s national reputation, and on communities in their darkest hours.

We turned traditional PR strategies on their head with a Community First communications approach. We tailored content to the full ecosystem of A-B’ stakeholders, including employees, supply chain partners, thought leaders, community partners and government officials.

We started in early 2017, developing a communications strategy and execution playbook and trained key spokespeople to prepare for hurricane season. Wherever possible, we planned to use representatives from the frontlines of the water donations program, rather than corporate spokespeople.

We ditched the long pitch notes and refrained from any paid media activities. Instead, we focused on sharing top-quality visual assets to help shoe-string newsrooms easily produce stories bringing the program to life. Each donation was a local story that fed into a larger national narrative. By maintaining a Community First approach, we were able to keep attention where it belonged – the people and communities A-B was helping.

Last fall, U.S. communities from the Gulf Coast to California were hit by devastating natural disasters. Showing how corporate size and scale can be a force for good, A-B put its production and logistics strengths to work by providing millions of cans of drinking water to those impacted in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Puerto Rico and California.

The 30-year-old A-B emergency water program, driven by the company’s Brewery in Georgia, had previously received only modest publicity. With the nation thirsty for uplifting news at a time of increasing division, we saw the opportunity to share A-B’s efforts with broader audiences, including

A-B’s own employees, supply-chain partners, and of course communities hit by these devastating disasters.

We set out to amplify A-B’s story in a sensitive and thoughtful way, driving A-B’s reputation as a good corporate citizen, while helping these devastated communities in the most practical ways possible.