Society has become apathetic towards women experiencing domestic violence. Many people don’t realize how hard it can be to escape an abusive relationship, yet still put the blame on the victim and ask questions like, “Why doesn’t she just leave?” Interval House, a shelter for abused women, set out to paint a different picture of what domestic violence looks like. We needed to change the conversation and help people understand the struggle women have when deciding to leave abusive relationships.

On Valentine’s Day, a time when everyone is talking about relationships, we launched one :90 video and two :30 videos on Facebook to an open audience, generating as much awareness and scale as possible for Interval House. The videos had an estimated daily reach of 240,000-1.4 million.

With only $5,000 in paid media, we reached well over 600,000 people, including multiple celebrity shares. We exceeded client expectations, but what really matters is that we actually made a difference. In terms of website traffic, there was a 62% increase in visits to the donation page and a 103% increase in clicks to the “Get Help” button. To Interval House, helping women be “the one that got away” is the most important result of all.

It’s difficult for people who aren’t suffering to understand why the victim didn’t “just leave.” The reality is that it takes an average of five attempts to leave an abusive partner, mostly because the victim still loves the abuser. Therefore, our approach was to make people unknowingly feel sympathy for the abuser so they can understand that leaving is not as easy as they think. Since most of these types of conversations happen in social media, we needed to spark empathy in the same channel people use to pose the question, “Why doesn’t she just leave?”

The idea was to create a series of documentary-style videos, capturing men’s heartbreak of love lost as they revisit memories of “the one that got away.” At first, the men seem sweet and honest, but the conversation takes a dark turn when it is revealed they are not the hopeless romantics we once sympathized with. In the end, we realize “the one that got away” in each case was actually a victim of domestic violence.