A few months before the elections in Brazil, we mapped out with UNICEF that there was a very important issue being forgotten: education, even with 2 million children out of school. We needed to shed light on the subject, but we had a very low budget for it. So, we created an event that, with the support of a PR strategy, generated news and posts on social media. We launched a life-size monument to education - a teacher and students in a classroom - in emblematic locations in capitals, and then the statues of the students curiously disappeared, leaving the "classrooms" empty. This fact generated the first big wave of news, as it aroused curiosity and indignation. Days later, the same statues reappeared in the surrounding streets, in vulnerable situations, showing the consequences of school dropout. The subject returned to the agenda of the media and society, achieving UNICEF’s aim.

2 million children are out of school in Brazil, but just a few months before the presidential election hardly anyone talked about it. To draw attention to this issue, Unicef inaugurated a monument with a teacher and her students in the classroom. It seemed like a tribute to education, but days later the statues of the students disappeared, showing what happens in most schools. This fact caught the attention of the media and when the subject was already in the main news, the statues reappeared in the streets in situation of risk. Each of them represents one of the reasons why millions of children drop out of school. A child appeared working selling sweets, another appeared holding a baby and so on. A sign next to them explained what had happened and called people to vote for education and put pressure on their candidates to show their proposals.

The main challenge of the strategy was to keep the unfolding of the idea a secret, since if revealed too early, it would lose the intended impact. The PR strategy worked on two fronts.

The first front informed the launch of an important UNICEF monument to the media and opinion makers. On that occasion, a press conference was held at the site, announcing new education data in Brazil.

In a second moment, with media allies and influencers, the disappearance of the student statues became public and a topic of discussion. Then, when the action was revealed, and the statues of the children appeared in vulnerable situations around the streets, highlighting the main causes of school dropout, it was time for the press and influencers to tell the whole story to their audience. At this point, education data gained notoriety, shedding light on UNICEF's goal: generate discussion for conscious voting.

How to bring this sad reality into focus with limited investment? We built a strategy based on two moments: generating attention and creating awareness.

To draw attention to the issue, we created the Education Monument in three cities across the country. The children in the monuments disappeared days later and appeared in situations of vulnerability within contexts that corresponded to the reality of school dropout, based on collected data.

The challenge of execution was to create an attractive and eye-catching monument in three cities across the country, in places known and visited by the population, within the same period, and that disappeared at the same time. It was a truly monumental operation to impact the entire country. With the support of UNICEF's partner influencers, the campaign gained even more attention, reverberating spontaneously in media outlets and becoming the central priority of the Ministry of Education.

The action generated hundreds of posts on social media platforms (Twitter and Instagram, with reels and stories) from people who saw the monuments, commented on the stages, shared media coverage or influencer content highlighting each moment of the action. In total, the reach of the posts was 59 million people and it became news in the country's main newspapers (TV and internet), generating an estimated value of $4 million in earned media, which resulted in almost 180 million impacts. However, the true impacts were raising awareness among the population - as education became the most searched topic on Google about elections during the election month, and a concrete response - as this mobilization led the new Brazilian government to prioritize reducing the number of children out of school.