The campaign set out to raise the issue of homelessness in Stockholm and drive donations to Stockholms Stadsmission (SSM) on a €9000 budget. The challenge was, apart from the budget, how to create empathy and understanding for the people living on the margins of society without exploiting their personal tragedies.

So we gave them a platform to tell their stories on their own terms. Tapping into the public's increased interest in photo art, we decided to put on a photo exhibition at Fotografiska (Scandinavia’s most esteemed museum of photography).

We made people living with homelessness official photographers, with a mission to show their perspective of Stockholm. In this way we let them decide how personal they wanted to get.

With Fotografiska on board, we involved Dagens Nyheter (Sweden’s biggest morning paper) to create an editorial theme that would allow maximum publicity in the period leading up to the exhibition opening.

The campaign resulted in a two-week exhibition at Fotografiska, where photos backed by personal captions gave visitors insights that hit them emotionally. Dagens Nyheter ran the photos as a Christmas calendar, featuring one photo and the story behind it each day.

The exhibition opened on Christmas Day at an event to which the general public as well as media were invited.

The campaign allowed us to reach a majority of Stockholmers on a daily basis for almost four weeks, the donations to SSM went up by 64% compared to last year and 25000 people visited the exhibition.

The campaign was pitched to Fotografiska in August 2012. The idea of juxtaposing the upcoming exhibition with David LaChapelle’s colourful surreal celebrity photography with the stark socio-realism of photographers living with homelessness intrigued them.

We organized sponsorship from Panasonic of cameras for 11 people from the homelessness projects. During a period of 6 weeks, they documented “their Stockholm”, mentored by 3 photographers. In parallel, we pitched the idea of running a series of articles based on the campaign to DN Stockholm, Sweden’s largest morning daily. They published one photo and the story behind it each day from 1-24 December as a Christmas Calender, paying the photographers for the image rights, treating them like regular freelancers.

Media were invited to the opening and offered interviews with photographers and Fotografiska used their channels to push for the exhibition (including one of Sweden’s largest Facebook pages). The exhibition ran for 2 weeks.

- Donations: up by 64% (26.2 MSEK) from the same period the year before.

- Media reach: The campaign reached a major part of the target audience daily for almost four weeks (average reach was 1 200 000/day). Dagens Nyheter supplemented their Christmas Calendar with in-depth interviews with 3 of the photographs resulting in both the cover and full-page spreads. Coverage peaked on Christmas Day with 11m reached on opening day through the major newspapers, radio and a 2:42 min cover in the national news channel (SVT).

- Visits: A total of 25 000 visited the exhibition in the two weeks it was running, which can be compared to Fotografiska having about 400 000 paying visitors 2012.

- Media value: The campaign generated an impressive 23.3 MSEK in media value.

- Most importantly, the participants were given a voice together with a sense of empowerment and belonging.