We had one simple but powerful objective; to urge parents to teach their children the most important lesson of all: how to save a life by dialing 999, the UK’s emergency services number.

We leveraged a real five-year-old’s 999 call to save her mother’s life and put it at the heart of our campaign for the UK’s largest network for parents, Mumsnet. We commissioned a survey to quantify the problem and raise awareness of the issues in teaching children to dial 999, giving us a news hook with media friendly headlines like 37% of parents haven’t taught their children to dial 999 and many British children are confused between the US’s 911 and 999. We created a website www.999forkids.com and a downloadable guide for parents. We obtained endorsement from the Red Cross and BBC support to provide expertise advice and legitimacy to the campaign.

With a spend of just £25k for a Mumsnet homepage takeover and the survey, we used PR and social media to tell Elleemae’s story, encourage mums to share the film and visit the website to teach their own children this invaluable lesson.

In two weeks, Elleemae’s story moved hundreds of thousands of mums through targeted press coverage and social media. Celebrity mums tweeted it. At least one school was inspired to teach every pupil to dial 999.

We reached 817,000 people through earned broadcast media alone, 600,000 of whom were mums. A total of 500m PR impressions achieving an equivalent advertising value of over £2.5m.

We looked for a real story to give our campaign its power. Once we found Elleemae’s call, we got permission from the emergency services and the family to use it and spent a week immersed with them to create the film. We built a website, researched and created a guide for parents as well as a cut out and keep reminder for kids of how to call 999. We enlisted the support of the Red Cross to check our materials for accuracy. We commissioned a survey with Mumsnet for our news hook, created an immersive press release on blogging platform medium, ensured we had mumsnet, the family and Red Cross as spokespeople. To launch the campaign, we targeted the biggest daytime TV shows, national papers, regional radio and parenting press, got the BBC to share it socially and used our contacts to get celebrity mums to tweet.

Only two weeks into the campaign, we achieved:

1. We reached 817,000 people with our campaign through earned broadcast media.

2. We reached 590,000 mums with our campaign through earned broadcast media.

3. We received £2,503,360 of equivalent media value alone in the first 2 weeks.

4. In the 2 weeks since the campaign launched we have already had over 500m PR impressions.

5. 3 x Facebook and Twitter posts from the BBC, British Red Cross and Mumsnet alone gained over 166,498 views, 3,438 shares, 2393 likes.

6. 3,000 people visited the 999ForKids.com website and spent an average of 3.40 min on the site.

7. Over 250,000 views to date and counting.