One of the biggest reasons children lose their grandparents to disability or death is stroke. The problem? 80% of patients don’t realise they are having a stroke until it’s too late. And 89% don’t call an ambulance but speak to a family member first. We realised that to save lives – either their own or that of a relative – people needed educating on stroke symptoms. And families needed to learn how to respond in a stroke-related emergency.

With stroke being a subject no one wants to talk about, it’s difficult conversation to have, making it problematic to educate our baby boomer audience. But who do this age group interact with most? Their grandchildren. Leveraging children’s enthusiasm for learning and sharing, we knew we could create an impactful campaign based on love and family to raise awareness of stroke symptoms and what to do to save a life.

We set out on our mission: saving the world, one grandparent at a time. To do this, we created an exciting FAST Grandheroes identity – a visually striking creative perfect for engaging children with stories, scenarios and symptom characteristics they could understand. Empowering them to spread this life-saving knowledge across their entire household.

The relationship between a child and their grandparents is unique. This allowed us to execute a campaign filled with emotion to capture the attention of our target audience. We chose an integrated solution to leverage every channel possible – creating branded collateral and content for both online and offline engagement with all stakeholders, from schools to homes.

Combining educational videos, online games, real-life tasks, puzzles, drawings and songs, our eLearning programme was designed to inject personality and enthusiasm into our messaging, with each activation designed to enhance the experience and encourage participation from our target audience.

Primary target - Baby Boomers. Between the ages 57 to 75. The average age of stroke patients are 70 years of age.

Secondary target - their children (Millennials). Ages of 25 and 39. A recent study of stroke patient behaviour showed that the first thing 89% of stroke patients did when their symptoms started was to ask for help. In 63% of cases they asked a relative/friend for advice first. Unfortunately, in 67% of times the advice given was wrong. We therefore could not only educate the patient, but also those they ask for advice.

Third target – their grandchildren. The kids are educated in school and then given the mission to educate their grandparents. Their parents learn mostly incidentally. We target kids between 5 – 9 years old as they are old enough to understand, and young enough to still want to do things for their Grandparents.

Our vibrant visual identity was the first step to encourage children’s participation and learning, making this serious topic more palatable, relatable, human. Using this powerful creative hook, we seamlessly integrated our scientifically proven pedagogy for a quality learning experience with real results.

We broke this complex topic into digestible lessons taught over five weeks. Each included real-life application of experiential learning methods, including repetition, spaced learning, memory pegging and incidental learning techniques to consolidate learning. This included linking symptoms to songs, voices, visuals and characters to bring the message to life in a way they could understand and share.

From hands-on workbooks and in-school lessons to a dedicated online hub and regular progress updates, our life-saving mission delivered many online and offline elements, including memorable videos, activities and gamification, while constantly incentivising family participation. Most importantly, the knowledge was delivered with sentiment by our most important channel – their grandchildren.

Since our in-school launch in July 2020, the FAST campaign has been live in 37 countries with almost 300,000 lessons taught to 53,721 kids in 2,390 classes – engaging with children and their families, particularly grandparents.

Our digital integration has delivered tremendous impact across all countries, with 1,406,195 website views, 20,804 e-books engagement, and 52,169,184 points earned across the online platform – showcasing huge engagement across FAST content.

This has been supported by our agency partners and social media activation, creating essential communities and conversations with our campaign’s reach at 9,346,336 impressions and 472,180 engagements.

We also continually optimised our educational programme to establish long-term success. This included interviewing 9,361 stroke patients to fine-tune our approach, as well as monitoring the key increase in caregiver knowledge, which has already risen by 71.5%.

We’re delighted with our progress but this is just beginning, with a target to enrol 1,000,000 kids worldwide.