The “End Family Fire” campaign is meant to bring awareness to this issue and prompt conversation among gun owners, especially those with children in the home, to ultimately make “Family Fire” a household term. Our approach is nonpartisan and focused on safety. We hope that families with a gun in the home will reevaluate their home-protection needs and take the necessary steps to be safe and responsible gun owners. Those who don’t own a gun can work to spread our message to impact their communities.

The overall production budget for the website was $130K all in, and we accomplished creating a full custom-build site and bespoke film shoot for both the website and print campaign pieces.

Family Fire gives this crucial issue a name, placing family (specifically the love of a parent for their child) at the center of the discussion. It’s inclusive of all gun-related tragedies involving an improperly stored or misused gun found in the home (including child shootings, suicides, domestic violence) and is purposefully nonpartisan.

The site’s content exists within a cinematic, narrative structure that starts in close proximity to a central firearm and vertically zooms out as the user scrolls to reveal the surroundings of the family’s home, floor by floor, through the roof until we are above an entire neighborhood. This film was shot specifically for the site and was not repurposed for any other pieces of content. Doing so allowed for complete control of the navigational paradigm structure and created a seamless storyline from start to finish.

We knew that conversations with Americans across the country were going to be critical in developing the perspective and empathy needed to change opinions. In our initial rounds of in-home research, we realized how difficult it was to have a constructive conversation about gun safety. We quickly came to the conclusion that telling people not to own a gun, telling them to remove guns from their home or branding gun owners as irresponsible was going to be counterproductive.

So instead, we chose to focus on the beliefs we all share: a desire to protect our families and a desire to keep guns out of the wrong hands.

The breakthrough for us was recognizing that while there was extensive coverage of gun control issues, particularly in the context of school shootings, there was limited discussion of the eight kids a day who are unintentionally killed or injured by an unlocked, loaded gun, often from the home.

This led us to understand that gun safety, not gun ownership, was the non-partisan key to reducing the number of children killed or injured every day while making progress on the client's overall mission.

The site was a complete custom build from start to finish with all bespoke content. The video content that is used within the cinematic narrative structure was shot specifically for the site, which was the only medium it was used in.

The design of the site is purposeful, keeping the amount of UI and information on the screen at any moment to a minimum. Information relevant to each location is presented starting with gun safety, then storage, then the conversations around owning a firearm and, finally, the community’s responsibility to safeguard it. The information is housed in selective UI elements that you can hover and roll over to display the content. With so much information to convey, it’s important that it does not overwhelm users as they continue on their journey.

Additionally, there are touches of specific development pieces that give the site an extra dimension. Dynamic WebGL dust particles overlaid add an extra sense of depth and authenticity to the whole experience, as well as the use of a custom script for After Effects that exports tracking data in order to control a 3-D camera, effectively syncing the film movement with the WebGL 3-D camera position.

From start to finish, we were able to accomplish all the production of the website within two months.

PSAs were distributed to media outlets nationwide prompting a national conversation and driving awareness of the issue. The campaign has garnered over $8M in donated media to date and traffic continues to the campaign hub, EndFamilyFire.org.

The site won the FWA site of the day, Awwwards Site of the day, CSS Design Awards Site of the day and was featured in Communication Arts, Ad Age, Adweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post.

The website had over new 100K+ users and over 36K active users on the day of launch. The average session duration was 1:42 with a bounce rate of only 13.48%. Lastly, users visited 5.19 pages per session, which means they experienced 62.5% of the overall site.