There’s a shocking gender gap in who receives Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) from bystanders.

Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of women, taking a woman’s life approximately every minute in the US alone.

Though prompt delivery of CPR can triple a cardiac arrest victims’ chances of survival, WOMEN ARE 27% LESS LIKELY THAN MEN TO RECEIVE BYSTANDER CPR. This makes a big difference: only 1 in 8 women survive cardiac arrest, versus 1 in 5 men.

We set out to close this gender gap. We had zero paid media dollars, so we knew our solution would need to educate people on how to give life-saving CPR to women AND be capable of receiving mass coverage by the media.

We found our solution in design -- a unique approach that could spark conversation and generate awareness, but also provide practical experience that would close the gender gap in CPR.

Our solution was to design a new product that would disrupt gender-bias in CPR training -- raising awareness while also helping instructors show how to administer CPR to a woman.

This is the Womanikin: a universal attachment to give breasts to flat-chested male CPR training manikins.

To make it more equitable and spread faster, our design was made open source, and paired with a highly-visible earned-media campaign

Created at the peak of the #metoo movement, where unwanted sexual touching was a daily news story, it became even more important to confront the stigma directly. It wasn’t enough to talk about the issue -- we needed people to actually practice touching a woman’s chest to give CPR.

This practice was so necessary, instructors using Womanikin in the field continue to report that even after lengthy instruction, many male students hesitate before attempting to administer CPR to the Womanikin in classes.

We had a problem. We had a lifesaving device to launch and not a single dollar to spend on media. We received an in-kind donation of $10K worth of Facebook media, however the algorithm misinterpreted images of the Womanikin as pornography and barred us from running on the platform. (Yes, for real.)

We needed a way to launch that would get massive earned social and press coverage.

We had two key audiences to win:

1) Pro-women individuals and organizations, to amplify our message and spread news of our new innovation.

2) The medical and CPR community -- a requisite for rapid adoption in a very technical and high stakes field.

Our strategy was to promote the statistic that started our journey and open people’s eyes to the gender bias in CPR manikins, grabbing attention with our high-impact product visuals.

The key message? “Learn on a woman. Save a woman.”

To announce The Womanikin, we tapped The United State of Women, a non-profit who agreed to promote The Womanikin on their social channels, showcasing our launch video assets, driving to womanikin.org.

Though we had an in-kind donation of $10K of Facebook paid media, the algorithm misinterpreted images of the Womanikin as pornography and barred them from running on the platform. (Yes, this happened.) Sadder still, this misunderstanding left us with $0 in paid media, we had to launch our creation with only organic social posts.

Knowing that it can be extremely difficult for an organic social campaign to go viral, we timed the campaign launch around a relevant media moment: National CPR Week (June 1-7). We knew The Womanikin would give publishers something interesting to run alongside traditional CPR stories. This PR strategy was effective, as we received enormous press pickup during National CPR Week.

The success of The Womanikin has been nothing short of astounding.

With zero paid media budget, we generated major news stories globally, and earned 23 million social impressions.

We began an ongoing partnership with American Heart Association training centers to manufacture Womanikin attachments at scale for use in university training.

We were invited to 8 medical conferences and panels, and established a partnership with Dr. Holly Andersen, cardiologist and medical advisor to the Women’s Heart Alliance.

17% increase in our awareness KPI, examining a basket of search-terms related to female heart-health and CPR between launch on 6/1 and 8/31, compared to previous year.

62 CPR training organizations requested Womanikin attachments or downloaded our toolkit to build their own.

Gold Effie for proving The Womanikin saves women’s lives.

Fully equalizing the CPR gender-gap (our ultimate goal), would save over 30,000 women’s lives per year in the US, alone.

Let’s not stop.