To spark good in the real world and make it spread, Cheerios and Ellen Degeneres created a powerful rallying cry—One Million Acts of Good.

We challenged people across America to do kind acts. From holding the door open for a stranger to flying disaster relief supplies to hurricane-struck areas of Puerto Rico—no act was too big or too small! As the good spread, we amplified and celebrated it, showing how the simplest acts can flood the nation with goodness and create measurable change.

Mobilizing One Million Acts of Good was going to be a herculean effort, so Cheerios and Ellen deeply integrated across their ecosystems to fire up every touchpoint in service of promoting the program.

We kicked off during Ellen’s show, asking people to do a good act and share it via #OneMillionActsOfGood. To amplify, we featured Ellen on our box, which has more impressions than the Super Bowl. Even U.S. retailers, like Walmart, joined the effort with bespoke initiatives.

22 on-air integrations and joint digital ecosystems spiked continued participation, for example:

Ellen designed a custom, do-good Instagram series

delighted with real-time and IRL rewards via Twitter

elevated everyday heroes on EllenTube and Cheerios’ social

gamified doing good with Ellen’s Heads’ Up app integration

Our joint rally led us to our goal in February 2018! To celebrate in a breakthrough way, we gave away $1 million to do-gooders on Ellen’s birthday finale.

The #1 win: we surpassed the One Million Acts of Good finish line.

This wasn’t just a pay-to-play but a passion program everyone rallied around. Ellen believed in the program so strongly that she included One Million Acts of Good in 22 episodes. Our joint communications reached 40.6 million adults and achieved 3x the impressions aimed for, garnering 389,835,997 impressions.

The message resonated and caught fire. Digital videos garnered 73 Million views and sparked 20 million engagements on Facebook / Instagram. Most importantly, the program generated over 1,002,750 good actions.

All partners experienced a positive impact. Ellen’s TV show viewership was up +37% for the finale (vs. the average episode). Cheerios experienced 2x the positive social sentiment that translated to retailers selling 6MM incremental boxes of Cheerios during the campaign.

It shows that when you start with good, the Good Goes Round.