In Canada, 88% of victims of spousal violence don’t report it. Interval House is striving to change that for female victims. When TMZ released the viral Ray Rice elevator video there was a massive uptick in domestic abuse as a topic of social conversation. It quickly grew negative – towards the victim. We pictured victims watching the coverage and witnessing the social conversation criticizing women of abuse for staying in those situations. It was unacceptable.

'Alternate Ending' mimics the original Rice elevator footage, but in our version a random person (a woman) comes on the elevator giving the victim a moment to choose to exit the negative situation.

Our goal was for women of abuse to see that there is an alternate ending to their story and that they feel empowered to make that a reality – by calling Interval House.

Our strategy was to use the burst of relevant social conversation and use an in-depth social seeding strategy to insert our video into the fray with the goal of steering the conversation towards ending violence against women instead of questioning or criticizing those victims for staying.

We positioned our video as 'The Elevator Video Worth Sharing' (as opposed to the brutal one that was still being shared at the time) and launched an in-depth social seeding process that would insert our video into relevant domestic abuse conversations.

The strategy included hijacking hashtags like #whyileft, #whyistayed, #vaw and, of course #rayrice on Twitter. Through social listening we found influencers who were actively engaged in those conversations and Tweeted the video to them to share while simultaneously thanking those who were actively trying to steer the conversation towards helping victims versus blaming or questioning them.

Our attitude was that if this campaign was to empower even one victim of abuse to pick up the phone and call Interval House for help, it would be a success. What resulted was a 39% call increase in the first 1.5 months of the campaign.

Below are more successful outcomes:

138% increase in website visits

16,350,000 impressions

A 25% spike in donations during the campaign period

A 25% increase volunteer inquiries during the campaign period