Following the riot, citizens turned to the temporary plywood on damaged storefronts to express their love for Vancouver and remorse over what happened. Seizing the opportunity to showcase this outpouring of affection we directed Vancouverites online to thisisourvancouver.com, a central platform for Vancouverites to convey their feelings while showing the rest of the world the true Vancouver. Comments, photos and video content were pulled from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. This profound display of love was used to show the rest of the world the real Vancouver, and to help restore the city’s damaged reputation.

When Vancouver’s Canucks lost the 2011 Stanley Cup finals, collective joy gave way to mob mentality and for one night the city burned. As news of the riot spread internationally, there was a dire need to redirect the global focus from a burning to a healing Vancouver. The task was to centralise a message of hope from all key stakeholders and to get word out that Vancouver was a city on the mend, courtesy of its citizens. We planned to do so by harnessing the sentiment of Vancouver’s citizens through an online outlet in which they could share their feelings.

There was $0 investment, as the agency, partners and community donated all services pro bono. Thus, ROI was substantial, based on 2 weeks of social media cultivation and PR activity.•Garnered over 19m media impressions•In 2 weeks: 28,300 page views, 19,000 visits, 14,800 visitors •2,000 'likes' and 2,059 shares on Facebook•Positive sentiment in blogosphere up 33.4% •Recognised by media outlets like Forbes, The Huffington Post, CTV, the Globe and Mail, and CTV News.•Our site inspired similar tactics internationally, helping London to recover from riots as well. (See www.thisisourlondon.com)

The strength of the campaign was that the message wasn’t a clever advertising stunt – we were able to show the world that the riot wasn’t an accurate representation of Vancouver’s citizens, by enabling Vancouver’s citizens to tell the world themselves: through a 100% user-generated platform. But it wasn’t just the content that was crowd-sourced; many local businesses and media outlets volunteered their services to generate awareness about the new platform and encourage widespread participation. The Vancouver Sun and The Province also contributed significant ad space to promote the site and help citizens reclaim their city.