The objective of the “Sweeper” experience was to promote UNMAS and the co-ordinated response to clearing the world of the remnants of war – land-mines and unexploded ordinance.

Our experience was aimed at raising awareness to the general public. The biggest challenge was making people care at a personal level for a cause that was not immediately visible to them, or impacted them directly. To get impact we worked from the premise that if there was a single land-mine in New York City, the city would come to a standstill.

To do this, we created an event at The New Museum in New York on International Mine Awareness Day. The event featured speeches by prominent UN staff, the Japanese Ambassador and images from the renowned photographer Marco Grob. Guided by the Sweeper app, visitors would explore the exhibit’s images of mine victims. With the aid of hidden iBeacons, visitors would unwittingly trip mines – and the sound of a loud explosion would rip through their headphones. The startled visitor would then be given an educational component on the “mine” they’d triggered, and finally would be encouraged to donate to the cause.

Unfortunately, we were working with a very limited budget – so that’s where PR came into play. To build interest in the event, we used a strictly social approach.

We introduced Sweeper-style visuals on the UN’s website and social properties, along with just simple facts. People responded and shared the content almost instantly.

Over the following few weeks, we continued to slowly increase our message until we built enough suspense and interest, at which point we shared the time, location and basic information of the New Museum event. At this point, we’d earned an interested and vocal audience that amplified our message and invitation.

After the New Museum exhibition had finished on International Mine Awareness Day UNMAS saw a 152% increase in donations over the previous year, and a 250% increase in traffic to the UNMAS website. The piece was widely discussed on social media with over 150 million impressions, and over $2,500,000 of earned media. Contagious wrote about the experience as having brought a level of emotion to technology that they had never seen before.