In solidarity with the March for Our Lives movement, WeTransfer did the first ever global roadblock of the site. Usually visitors are served with a mix of adverts, promos for our premium offer and creative artworks. That weekend though everyone was served the same message, calling for an end to gun violence and encouraging them to sign the March for our Lives petition.

At the same time we launched a series of creative projects which added something new to the gun reform conversation:

– An PSA film with veterans discussing the dangers of assault weapons

– An interactive story about a mother whose daughter was killed in a mass shooting

– A set of new artworks inspired by the hashtag #enoughisenough

– An interview with a photographer who documents gun violence survivors

The main message was a simple typographic wallpaper which spelled out why we were making a stand. The simple use of an animated strikethrough added a little motion without being distracting.

The 4 x content projects were designed to show how creative voices can contribute to issues like gun violence. Each content project had its own look and feel, led by the stories themselves. We wanted four very different creative disciplines to speak to as broad an audience as possible, hence the combination of film, literature, illustration and photography.

Between the Friday and the Sunday evening, we had 80,000 brand mentions and 400 million WeTransfer related social impressions. As well as Emma’s Tweet, our projects were picked up by a congresswoman, and nine press outlets wrote stories including Quartz, The Drum and It’s Nice That. 300,000 people came to our content projects that weekend.

Most excitingly, the film we commissioned with the veterans was shown on the big screens at the main March for Our Lives in Washington DC.

WeTransfer is a non-traditional media platform; a file-transferring service with 42 million MAUs which uses its full-screen backgrounds to showcase creative projects from around the world (alongside its adverts). The scale of the user base gives us a massive opportunity to reach a vast international audience with our messaging – commercial, cultural or political.

The target audience was WeTransfer users across the world, and then anyone who cares deeply about gun reform. Our campaign was given a massive boost when Emma Gonzalez, one of the Parkland survivors, shared a link to her 1.5million Twitter followers the one of the content projects on the eve of the march. We were able to put the piece in front of Emma thanks to our links with the activism community in Los Angeles.

WeTransfer believes creative thinking has the power to change the world. When it comes to gun violence, people are done with fear being the norm. So are we. We wanted to make a stand in a meaningful way and show how the creative industries can contribute to these kinds of social issues by providing new ways of thinking about them.