Invisible Friends: Making the process of participating in the search for a missing person as simple as adding a friend on Facebook.

MPAN (Missing Persons Advocacy Network) is a charity that actively empowers families and friends in the search for their missing loved ones. So whilst awareness and recognition is critical to the organisation, MPAN needed to find ways to help in the long-term search for missing people.

Invisible Friends is a campaign that created facebook profiles for long-term missing people, populating them with personal information and photos for each individual. Then, by 'hijacking' Facebook's facial recognition technology, the act of simply adding a friend turned into the largest search for missing persons the world had seen.

Whilst the technology that sat behind the campaign was incredibly complex, the way we brought it to life through owned and earned communications was remarkably simple.

For an organisation who has no marketing budget or media budget, the campaign generated an estimated $1.6m in free digital media and positive and advocate-led behaviors from the Australian public. Over 10,240 Australians have added one of our ‘missing persons’ as a friend on Facebook. This enabled us to then search over 751,576,462 photos to date – with that number only increasing as time goes on.