The Trump administration has made it a mission to undermine and dismantle the Affordable Care Act – slashing the advertising budget by 90% and cutting the open enrollment period in half. And while healthcare has become an extremely convoluted and highly partisan issue, we don’t think it needs to be. Enter, the Coverage Coalition. A non-partisan group of like-minded, concerned citizens who believe that access to affordable healthcare is a human rights issue.

Spreading awareness wasn’t enough. Talking about this problem was definitely important, but we needed to drive action in order to make real change in people’s lives. We needed people to visit healthcare.gov, learn about their healthcare options, and ultimately, sign up. This was a tall order for something as daunting, polarizing, and confusing as healthcare.

We quickly learned that we weren’t the only ones who cared strongly about this issue. People around the country were outraged by the actions of the President and were left feeling helpless and scared. The least we could do would be to donate our specialized talents toward making sure people knew their options for healthcare and signed up.

The idea: Make up the 90% cut to the ACA advertising budget, with the help of other like-minded concerned citizens, particularly those in advertising, design, media, and insurance fields.

Healthcare is a complex and daunting topic, so we needed our messaging to be the opposite: simple and straightforward, friendly and approachable. Instead of getting caught up in all the nuances and complicated details that often vary state to state, we focused on the big picture: Affordable healthcare is available to you, it’s even more affordable than you think, and the time to sign up is now.

The use of data allowed us to target priority audiences and key markets – and adjust our messaging accordingly based on different variables, including language, location, motivators, and timing.

The goal was simple: Tell people they were eligible for affordable healthcare and make up for the 90% budget cuts set forth by our President.

First, we reached out to our friends and partners who possessed a unique skill set that allowed us to make difficult information easily digestible. We had to communicate clearly and efficiently and on a large scale. Healthcare is a complicated-enough issue, even without the hiccups of budget cuts.

The brief was straightforward: create content letting people know about the enrollment period, where to enroll, and make this very daunting process seem significantly less overwhelming. At the same time we were reaching out to our partners to join the Coverage Coalition, we were also generating work on our own – social posts, TV spots, radio ads, and OOH. Soon, our media partners helped us find stages to promote our creative, pushing enrollment numbers to record-breaking highs.

Agencies, design shops, and even production companies created content to spread the word. Park Pictures was able to create the Paul Revere spot in five days from start to finish. Media companies donated space across national TV, digital, radio, out-of-home and even Times Square and our Facebook Messenger chatbot helped users navigate the sign-up process.

The Coverage Coalition reached over 100 million people in the month and half campaign period. But the good news didn’t stop there. In the first week, enrollments were up 179% over 2016. The second week, enrollment was up 60%. In fact, every week of open enrollment was up over previous years.

The one thing Trump didn’t want to happen... did. In part, because concerned citizens stood up to say, 'If you're not going to tell America, we will.”

With basically no time or money, we needed to focus our efforts in order to be as impactful as possible. We scoured through countless datasets – cross-referencing and correlating data to identify insights and opportunities.

Data helped us identify target audiences based on key demographics such as location, age, race, and ethnicity. This ensured we would reach those who were most in-need and at-risk. Using past enrollment data, we identified sign-up trends by week, day, and even time of day to ensure that we were reaching the right people, with the right message, at the right time.

Next, we prioritized key markets – like Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia. To organize these markets into priority tiers, we dug into ACA enrollment data from previous years, current rates of uninsured, at-risk populations, and layered on data about those states with the steepest funding cuts to ACA, Navigator Programs, and Medicaid.

The Trump administration slashed the advertising budget for the Affordable Care Act by 90% and cut the enrollment period in half versus previous years. As a result, fewer people were going to know about their government funded healthcare options, and because of this, fewer people were likely to enroll.

In response, we formed the Coverage Coalition, a non-partisan consortium of concerned citizens to make up for the 90% budget cut. We would get the word out about the different healthcare options and help people enroll themselves and their family members by coming together as an industry to do the right thing.