Child Focus, the Belgian center for missing and sexually exploited children was launched 25 years ago. Ever since, they have been helping parents of missing children. Every year, on May 25th, the official day of missing children, Child Focus launches a campaign to highlight their efforts. Mostly, these campaigns ask for people’s help in the search for missing children, but this year Child Focus wanted to focus on prevention. Instead of trying to find back children, they wanted to prevent children from going missing or from running away from home.

Together with the police, the missing person’s department and different specialists, Child Focus launched Missing First Aid. An online course that teaches parents what to do when the unthinkable happens. People could take the four chapter course on an interactive website and get helpful prevention tips or useful information to help them when their child goes missing.

The course was launched in a tv commercial, print ads, on radio and social media, reassuring parents they will probably never have to put it into practice. But we also addressed parents with special announcements in supermarkets, saying a child was found back, before inviting them to take the course. And for once, the nationwide outdoor network that’s normally used to spread missing posters, was used to show found posters.

Child Focus does everything to help parents when a child goes missing. But the best way to help, is preventing children from disappearing. So, instead of doing a short-term campaign that asks people to look for children, let’s launch a long-term prevention campaign.

The course was created with the help of the police, the missing person’s department and different specialists. We brought together all their tips, tricks and extra information in a four chapter course presented by Fatma Taspinar, a Belgian journalist who is known for her documentaries about missing children. Each chapter was an interview between her and a specialist. This audio course was made available on an interactive website where people got access to a lot of background information. Later, the course was also made available as podcast on Spotify.

People who finished the course got an official MFA certificate. They could download this and print it out to put on their wall, or share it on their Facebook wall. But we also made a filter, so they could even put it on their background wall during video calls.

The campaign got more than 40 million media impressions. And with an engagement rate of 9% it shows it touched the right nerve. Already we reached 2 out of 3 Belgian households, but Missing First Aid will always stay available for every Belgian parent.