We were in a tricky situation where we wanted to inform children in a way where their parents wouldn’t be able to capture the message. To be sure about this we contacted influencers with young community (into gaming, sport, lifestyle, humor) and made them post 3 stories without any tags. These stories were posted at a specific time, when young audiences are usually online.

To reveal our avatar to the public, two influencers we partnered up with (Justriadh and Vargass92), presented the operation to the press... But our main ambassador was the avatar itself.

Younger generations have never been so connected. However, it remains hard to reach them and harder for them to speak up for revealing potential abuses. While familial violence has dramatically increased in 2020, Enfant Bleu, a French charity, needed to find a solution for having an easier way to reach these kids. With schools closed, our main alert system was short-circuited, as a protection association usually rely on teachers for detecting cases of abused children. Our challenge was to create a new channel for children to free their speech. To do so, we thought about going where they feel confident and spend their time, within video games.

We created the first in-game Fortnite character whose mission was not to win the game but to listen to abused children in order to save them. The avatar was played by members of the association to discuss with other young players and detect cases of abuses using the in-game chat system. The whole operation should be “undercover”, as if abusive parents were informed about the avatar, they could ban the game. This way we also should avoid traditional mainstream media, and focus on micro-influencers to reach a very specific target.

Because influence is a powerful tool for the younger generation we divided our strategy into two parts : The first one was dedicated to influencers, the second one to mass media.

Because the younger generation exchange a lot on social media and gaming platform, we based our recommendation on those insights. We imagined our operation and created our campaign around it without getting notice by the parents or the media that could interfere with our desire to help children in tricky situations. The influencer was, at first, our first relay to bring awareness on the character and make it easy to find by abused children. The mass media would be contacted at the end of the operation to reveal we created a new way for reaching children by getting in through their passions and a media they use : video games.

The plan was divided in two steps

First, we partnered up with streamers and esport teams, the perfect ambassadors for reaching youngsters. These talents are powerful on Twitch, so we developed specific creative assets to reveal the avatar during livestream sessions. We also developed assets for Instagram stories. Sometimes, fans shared the initiative on their own social media, we let them do if it was short-lived content but we had to ask them to delete their publications if it was a tweet or in their Instagram feed.

Secondly, we worked with popular young talents in order to reach more young people. We wanted to reach as much as possible our target to activate the word of mouth effect.

After the reveal, we set up a PR strategy to make the character public and open a national debate around video games and their power to help kids.

While our Fortnite character was online, we received 1 200 friend requests from kids. 30% of these requests were related to dangerous situations asking for urgent treatments.

But for an association, an important KPI was also the capacity to raise visibility of the cause defended in mainstream media and in public conversation. Undercover Avatar achieved to generate more than 700 million media impressions thanks to press coverage.

Impact was so strong that French government through the competent authorities decided to set up a specific task force gathering gaming publishers, French Justice and French Police in order to work on solutions to turn video games into a new way to identify players who are abused kids. Even French Police mentioned that this campaign was recognized by their US colleagues from FBI.

Enfant Bleu association is now one of the top social actors. In 2020 they received +30% of donations vs 2019.