When it comes to gun safety, it's not a fair fight. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has a lot of money– and therefore influence. They can afford lobbying, buy politicians' loyalty and blanket media with pro gun messaging.

Change the Ref is a small organization started by the parents of one of the victims of the Parkland school shooting. To cope with the pain of their son's murder, they made it their mission to take on the powerful gun lobby.

With very limited funds and no paid media, we created an unignorable message that was carried around the world.

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 created a tactic that generated its own media. We brought back one of the victims of a horrific school shooting to serve as a voice nobody could ignore.

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.

On October 1, 200, just before the end of the period when Americans could register to vote, we launched 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 then re-broadcast our message with these assets.

Users could also upload their own lost loved one and, of course, were directed to register to vote and then go vote in the 2020 Presidential election.

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 on Twitter alone.

-To our surprise, it was covered by media in countries around the world, well beyond our target audience. For example, in the UK, Good Morning Britain did a long segment including an interview with the founders of Change the Ref. Secondary news reports covered how affected the hosts were by the emotion of the topic.

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

-It was discussed at length by right wing media and pundits, generating more publicity.

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