A SOCIAL-POWERED ACTIVATION THAT GETS REAL FOOD TO THE PEOPLE WHO NEED IT THE MOST THIS HOLIDAY.

During a very food-focused season, we saw an opportunity to use the empty plate emoji—an established part of Internet foodie culture—to remind people of the very real empty plates that exist for 1 in 5 kids in America.

We came up with Fill the Plates, a social-powered activation that asked people to post the empty plate emoji + #RealFoodSunday to donate real food to families in need. For every post, 50 meals were donated through No Kid Hungry, with the added benefit of bringing attention to the hunger issue at large.

We pre-seeded the activation a couple days ahead of launch to prime our fans. Then, we launched with a short, explanatory video on the Sunday before Christmas to tie the activation to our #RealFoodSunday mission.

Concurrently, we had eight foodie influencers including Richard Blais, Donatella Arpaia and Geoffrey Zakarian post on their social channels. That started a domino effect of participation and sharing.

Throughout the day, we celebrated our donation milestones to stoke more participation. We also showed our appreciation with real-time, personalized thank yous to those who participated, and we ended up engaging in two-way conversations with a handful of major food, TV and film personalities, including Martin Starr, Shiri Appleby and William Shatner, all of whom participated out of the goodness of their hearts!

Finally, after the activation, we posted a general thank you, highlighting the hundreds of thousands of meals we were able to donate.

Through the activation and enthusiastic participation of thousands of people,

- A total of 500,000 real food meals were donated to families in need

- We saw 60x the weekly average of #RealFoodSunday hashtag mentions

- We became the trending topic on Twitter in Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle, within six hours of launch

- We received 26 million earned impressions, partly in thanks to celebrities like William Shatner, who tweeted on behalf of our cause out of the goodness of their hearts