El Centro de Desarrollo de la Comunidad A.C. is an association dedicated to bettering the lives of people in marginalized areas of Mexico City.

Our biggest challenge was to create awareness to the work being done by CDC, in order to add the support of those members of society with greater resources, therefore helping these marginalized communities that are located in the same territory.

The objectives pointed to gaining resources and support in order to help more people in these troubled neighborhoods and extend the reach of the CDC program to more areas.

The strategy was to demonstrate, in a compelling way, that the problem and the solution for these people is just a few steps away.

Execution: First, through the publication of impressive aerial photographs, we showed a reality that had never seen before depicting the dramatic social unbalance between the inhabitants. Later the campaign prints became conversation generators the moment we planted them in some blogs an social networks, from there, it grew until it was news around the world.

Result: The campaign became global news, impacting millions of people while sharing a message of support and donations, which eventually led to the creation of three additional contact centers.

The benefits of having designed this PR strategy allowed us to establish a real message that felt close, without filters and was tangible, all things that a conventional campaign would never have been able to achieve.

We took aerial photographs focusing exactly on the line that literally divides the poor from the rich. The idea was to show the contrast, we didn’t expect to find as many as we did. The contrast was so surreal that the photographs seamed like manipulated images that we put together, even though they were completely real.

We decided to share the unbranded photographs with the local media. As expected, they were used as content to talk about the social disparity in the country. What we didn’t expect was that the rest of the world would use them too.

Just when the photos were news around the world, we launched our campaign.

“This image has not been modified. It’s time to change that. Erase the difference at www.robertohernandez.com”

The response was overwhelming, we receiving countless hits from around the world.

During the campaign we achieved 87,546 mentions worldwide.

The reach of the campaign was: 5,247,973

The spread was: 944,572

We shared the photographs with a few local sites and media, but the campaign was shared all around the world. The campaign put the problem and CDC on the map. Because of the campaign, other places in Mexico started requesting support from CDC. CDC triplicated the number of attention centers and now helps more than 13,000 families improve their lives.

Before the campaign CDC struggled to find volunteers to help them in the communities, today they have a waiting list of more than a thousand willing to work form them for free.