The fact that 14,000 children seek refuge in Sweden every year is ungraspable. The children are reduced to numbers, with small emotional connection to the Swedes. Furthermore, using children's real faiths in the communication is very delicate, since they are legally and emotionally vulnerable and need to be treated with care.

Regardless of these challenges, our key objective was to make this problem felt, not merely understood, to get earned attention in media and to get 15,000 Swedes to sign a petition to make the UN Convention of the Child a Swedish law.

Media Execution

We recorded children behind a white screen. They were directed to move as refugee children on the streets, with big backpacks illustrating how they had nowhere to go. When projected, they melt into the street environment with close to ghostlike perfection.

We were projecting for two weeks, nightly. Either at crowded places, or places raising the artistic feeling of the films.

Channels:

Street projections, to get immediate reactions and activation from bypassers on the street.

PR to maximize earned media for the campaign. Journalists got press material, including films of our projections to spread in their channels.

Online, we used the hashtag #escapeendshere (#flyktenslutarhar) and we spread our material on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. All communication lead to our campaign- and petition-site.

Result

Through an emotional concept we got people to react in the streets and online.

The unusual content got the conversation started online and we got an earned media reach of 25 million people.

So far, 45,582 have signed a petition to make UN Convention on the rights of the child a Swedish law (37,000 during the campaign period of 2 weeks).