For our entire lives, we've been socialized to not trust strangers. Yet Airbnb's entire business model is based on strangers trusting each other.

So we decided to embark on an audacious social experiment. To rid the world of strangers, one act of hospitality at a time.

There was no better time to do that than New Years. People are already thinking about resolutions, fresh starts and personal growth. New Years provided an opportunity to tap into that spirit and give people a gift that felt both personal and inspirational.

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky gifted one million dollars to 100,000 people in the global Airbnb community, ten dollars at a time. In an email, he urged them to use this donation to make one less stranger, then document it and upload it to social media with #OneLessStranger.

It created a chain reaction of #OneLessStranger acts, spreading from the Airbnb community and out into the world, from instagram photos to twitter posts to Facebook videos, all shot and uploaded on peoples’ phones all over the world.

The one million dollars made it the largest social experiment of it's kind and was written about by over 300 media outlets around the world putting Airbnb's brand beliefs in the spotlight.

Airbnb’s entire business model focuses on opening up homes to strangers. Strangers are the enemy of their business and their brand beliefs. This campaign tackled this enemy, but not in a typical promotion, discount or coupon way. We put our trust in our community – a tenet of the “less strangers” mentality – and gave them a donation to pay it forward to a stranger. It’s more of a movement-making reward than a reward, and in the end, participants were rewarded with an experience, not a thing, which is also an intangible benefit of Airbnb’s sharing economy. We began by sending an email inviting people to participate and then sent a follow-up email a few weeks later. Our social team thanked people for participating, retweeted their posts and encouraged more people to do the same. A simple beginning for a campaign with a profound social impact on culture and for the brand.

With one email, we had a 28% click through rate, as compared to a 2.52% travel industry average. Our end goal was to create a social movement, and that we did. Within one month of the launch, we had 130m earned media impressions with 25m people recalling the campaign in the US alone and 350 media articles across the globe. In two months, we had over 3.8 million engagements with campaign content, from creating their own content, sharing and commenting on others’ content and engaging with the campaign as a whole. But beyond all of those statistics, the campaign carried a 98% net positive sentiment. We are on the way to a world with less strangers, where all of us can belong anywhere, and that is truly a social movement. As for the 2%, you can’t start a movement without a few dissenters.