Gun violence in schools is a national issue in the U.S. But the constantly changing news cycle, from outrage to outrage, means awareness of the issue enters a cycle of its own, slipping into the background before change can be made.

How do we keep school gun violence top of mind for everyone?

We get people to think of school violence daily, just like the weather.

Gun control is a hot-button issue throughout the United States. We sought to reframe the issue within the specific bounds of the frequency in which gun violence takes place in our schools, rather than gun violence in general.

We want people to think of school violence daily, just like the weather forecast. So we created a “school shooting forecast” depicting the historical likelihood of gun violence in our schools on any given day, and juxtaposed that forecast against dynamic, real-time, and localized forecasts of other daily weather events. When viewers saw the chance of a school shooting is nearly as likely, or even more so than, for instance, rain…it brought the reality of the issue to the fore.

We had the message. We needed the medium. We decided to bring the forecast to Advertising Week to get the word out to our peers that it was time to get the word out to the entire United States, seeking media and creative partners to take our campaign nationally.

We created 12-second videos to play on the dozens of screens throughout the venue, a print ad that ran in the program, and a mobile billboard that circled the venue. All simply and clearly showed the national school shooting forecast beside a localized forecast from around the United States.

This campaign was designed to attract other industry peers to join our cause and spread the campaign nationally. The stickiness of our message in the press and our impactful presence at the largest advertising event in the U.S. not only made an impression with the 98,000 industry attendees at Advertising Week, but also garnered nearly 100MM earned media impressions overall. This led to conversations with industry and media partners who feel as strongly as we do that it's time to #ChangeTheForecast. 2018 turned out to be the deadliest year in history for school shootings. We’re hoping our campaign will mean 2019 could be the year the forecast finally changes.