In Canada, 88% of victims of spousal violence don’t report it. Interval House is striving to change that. When TMZ released the viral Ray Rice elevator video there was a massive uptick in domestic abuse as a topic of social conversation. It quickly grew negative – towards the victim. We pictured victims of abuse watching the coverage and witnessing the social conversation criticizing woman of abuse for staying in abusive situations. It was unacceptable.

We used the burst of relevant social conversation to steer it towards ending the violence and empowering victims to call Interval House.

The steps:

- We created the Ray Rice response video in just six days, a couple of weeks after the original went viral.

- We positioned it as 'The Elevator Video Worth Sharing' on YouTube on September 25th, and included Interval House's contact info buried in the description for victims to find discreetly.

- We launched an in-depth social seeding process that would insert our video into relevant domestic abuse conversations, starting by hijacking hashtags like #whyileft, #whyistayed, #vaw and, of course #rayrice on Twitter and began Tweeting the video ourselves using them.

- We used social listening to find influencers who were actively engaged in those conversations and Tweeted the video to them to share.

- We simultaneously thanked those who were actively trying to make the conversation more positive and asked them to share the video as well.

Our attitude was that if this campaign was to empower even one victim of abuse to pick up the phone and call Interval House for help, it would be a success. What resulted was a 39% call increase in the first 1.5 months of the campaign.

Below are more successful outcomes:

138% increase in website visits

16,350,000 impressions

A 25% spike in donations during the campaign period

A 25% increase volunteer inquiries during the campaign period