Situation

Attendance at many nonprofit, visitor-serving organizations has declined. At the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, 2019 attendance was trending down 7.8% in the summer compared to 2018 numbers. The majority of those who were visiting the library were older and more familiar with JFK’s legacy.

Brief

In order to attract more visitors, the library wanted to cast a wider net and attract younger audiences who were not as familiar with JFK. They saw the opportunity to use the momentous occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission as a way to own a piece of the conversation about the historic event and to raise awareness for JFK’s connection to it.

Objectives

1. Raise awareness for JFK’s legacy

2. Drive engagement with the library online and in-person

Reimagine the Apollo 11 Mission as if it happened today.

JFK Moonshot was a fully-synchronized augmented reality experience of Apollo 11 where every moment, maneuver, and milestone unfolded in real time, second-by-second, precisely 50 years later.

Census data showed that 62% of the population was not alive at the time of the Apollo 11 launch. Additionally, a UVA study showed those under 60 did not associate JFK with the moon landing as much as their elders did. Young people did not know who Kennedy was and did not associate him with being pivotal to the moon landing.

A strategic unlock came when we poured through pictures of the crowd at the Apollo 11 launch in 1969 juxtaposed against images from modern day live events. How we experience events is drastically different. Today, we view them through our phones so that the physical and digital become one. We then share it through social media. This is how history-in-the-making events are experienced now and one of the reasons that leveraging social media along with tech like augmented reality can improve memory recall by as much as 70%.

Our experience invited users to relive President Kennedy’s vision for the mission with interactive AR games, archival NASA footage and educational multimedia experiences.

Our design aesthetic leveraged a retro-futuristic design style heavily influenced by JFK's iconic Americana style combined with the NASA standards and guides used during the mission in 1969, resulting in a clean and modern UI.

We designed the experience into four main parts:

1 // Launch — users could visit the Library to launch a full-scale AR version of the Saturn V rocket or launch a scaled down version from anywhere.

2 // Track — Follow the mission in real-time AR from a ”’god view" perspective

3 // Play — 10 AR games with JFK-related trivia questions and UI based on NASA astronaut dexterity training.

4 // Log — 100+ hours of rare archival images and multimedia

To scale the experience, we did three things. First, at precisely 9:32 AM on July 16th at the JFK Library in Boston, we launched one of the largest AR objects ever created—a 363-foot (110 meter), full-scale replica of the Saturn V rocket. The whole event was timed to match exactly to the original mission 50 years ago.

Next, we livestreamed the launch as a first-of-its-kind AR experience on Twitch where some of the most popular streamers provided a “play through” of the action. Additionally, the Moonshot app allowed allowed kids of all ages to launch their own virtual rockets anywhere and share it on social media.

For the next four days, users could track the mission in "AR god view" in real-time with data (speed, stage, time until landing) gleaned from the original mission. 10 additional AR games with JFK-related trivia questions and a UI based on NASA astronaut dexterity training allowed users to practice their own moon landings.

During the course of our campaign, the JFK Presidential Library and Museum reversed the nationwide trend of declining museum attendance with a 5% increase in attendance, along with:

• 110,000+ rocket launches around the world

• 140,000+ downloads of the app

• 8x more social mentions that competitive museums

• 240,000,000+ global brand impressions

Furthermore, a post campaign survey revealed an 11% increase related to JFK inspiring “innovation in American science and technology”.