We needed to persuade people that had suffered baby loss to break the silence and start the conversation.

But how do you get the public talking about the uncomfortable topic of baby loss? Search insight revealed that celebrity news and soap operas sparked conversation.

Beyoncé talking openly about her own experience spiked public interest and search.

But celebrity coverage often over-simplifies the issue, doing little to encourage people who had lived through baby loss to speak out. This inspired us to jump on the coverage and combat the misrepresentation to change perception and prompt the people that had lived through baby loss to speak up.

Using a unique algorithm we identified and reacted to news coverage in real time. Then, inspired by historical search data, we approached the UK’s most popular TV channel, the BBC, and built a campaign around a miscarriage storyline running in the UK’s number one soap.

Using real-time alerts from our algorithm and access to Tommy’s in-house editorial team we regularly created content directly challenging careless headlines. We published this content to Tommy’s social community just as headlines gained traction in national news. This prompted the sharing of our content across Tommy’s community and further afield.

Additionally, to achieve the scale we needed to help make Tommy’s goal a reality, we turned to EastEnders’ popularity as a vehicle for content distribution. Whilst EastEnders is watched by 7M people on the BBC, the broadcaster does not allow advertising, even for charities. To overcome this and put Tommy’s campaign at the heart of popular culture we persuaded the BBC to allow us access to the soap opera’s huge social following of 3m Facebook and 2.4m Twitter followers. EastEnders then reposted and retweeted our videos on their Facebook and Twitter straight after the episodes aired.

Key Highlights:

On several occasions our news hijacking strategy was so effective that our compassionate content was more widely shared than the original Daily Mail piece (App. 1).

Within 24 hours of our EastEnders’ campaign going live we achieved:

- 1M views with no paid support, 4500% higher than usual post from Tommy’s.

- The second highest day of traffic to Tommy’s website.

- Over 1.2K comments from people sharing their own stories of baby loss.

To date our strategy resulted in:

- Highest ever awareness of baby loss week (App.2)

- Highest ever conversation of baby loss (86% increase YOY. Crimson Hexagon)

- Highest year of awareness and advocacy for Tommy’s (App.3)

- The highest year of traffic to Tommy’s website (up 45% YOY)

- The highest year of donations for Tommy’s (up 75% YOY)

- The greatest increase in Tommy’s community (up by 30%)