The gun debate in the United States is an echo chamber. One side talks about how "they're trying to take away our right to own guns" and the other talks about how bad guns are.

At this point, you can't change people's opinions. Instead, you have to motivate them to actually do something: vote for politicians who are willing to enact sensible gun safety laws.

So we leveraged the authentic voice of one of the victims of one of the most horrific mass shootings in United States history to urge people to register and vote during the 2020 Presidential election.

Gun violence kills 40,000 people in the US every year. That’s thousands of lost votes that could help elect gun-sense politicians, yet in the previous election some states were decided by as few at 10,000 votes. So, how could we get people to help replace those lost votes?

We needed sympathetic but unregistered voters to register to vote. And unmotivated registered voters to actually go do it. Telling them the facts wasn't going to do it. They've heard the statistics about the importance of voting countless times. Instead, we needed to use emotion to get them up and out.

So we leveraged a voice they couldn't ignore, one of the victims of the horrific Parkland school shooting.

Who better to get Americans to vote for gun safety than people killed by guns?

In 2018, Joaquin Oliver was killed in a horrific mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. The 2020 election would have been the first year he could have voted. Working with his parents and revolutionary AI technology, we brought Joaquin back to life digitally to deliver a message to all those who weren’t registered- or even just likely- to vote.

The film showed Joaquin pleading for those viewers to vote on his behalf because he can’t vote for himself. It drove viewers to unfinishedvotes.com, where people could register to replace his vote and those of other gun violence victims.

The site adapted dynamically, so when people pledged their vote for a victim, the entire site experience and social content became personalized to that victim’s story. Users could even upload their own lost loved one to the site.

We knew that 40,000 people are killed by guns in the US each year. We also knew that those people- and their loved ones- would be the most likely to be motivated by the single issue of gun safety. And that just replacing a fraction of these lost votes could shift the dynamic in a vital election, especially since some states had been decided by as few as 10,000 votes in the previous Presidential election.

By leveraging our gun safety client's owned channels (and their allies in the community), we were able to reach our core target- friends and family of people affected by gun violence. Of course, that also reached the opposition, who served to amplify our message further.

And that message was delivered in the most hard hitting way possible- by Joaquin and his parents asking people to vote for him, because he couldn't.

We started with a powerful film shared over Change the Ref's owned channels (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram). Joaquin's parents' pain set the emotional stakes. And then the digital recreation of Joaquin came along, pleading with people to make a change.

It drove to unfinishedvotes.com, where users could pledge to replace Joaquin's vote and those of other gun violence victims. The site adapted dynamically, so when people pledged their vote, the entire site experience and social content became personalized to that victim's story. Users could also upload their own lost loved one and, of course, were directed to register to vote.

The experience released in October, shortly before the end of voter registration and ran through the 2020 Presidential election.

The impact was immediate.

Due to sensitivity around US voting issues in this election, we were very careful not run afoul of privacy via tracking or other data collection. However:

-The video was viewed over 2.4 million times within 24 hours of launch.

-To our surprise, it was covered by media in countries around the world, well beyond our target audience.

-Within our target, it quickly became the #1 trending topic on the anti-gun Fox News platform.

-Most importantly, over 1,290 pro gun-sense politicians were elected in 2020.