Situation: Despite 8.8 million job openings nationwide, the unemployment rate among those with criminal records remains alarmingly high at 27%. This costs the US up to $87 billion in lost economic opportunities.

Brief: Bring attention to the situation (see above) and bring hope to the millions of people caught up in a system that was designed to fail them.

Objectives: Get people talking about Clean Slate Initiatives as the coverage of the 2024 federal elections takes shape, and ultimately, to remove barriers for people with past criminal records so they can get back into society and find meaningful employment.

One in three Americans has a criminal record. Even after they’ve paid their debts to society, they have trouble accessing meaningful employment, housing and education. To bring attention to Clean Slate laws that would automatically clear eligible records, we created The Waiting Workforce. 38 statues made out of the onerous and expensive paperwork keeping millions from clearing their records - one statue for each state that has yet to pass this legislation. We displayed them in Independence Mall, where the Constitution (America’s most important piece of paper) was signed, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the first state to adopt these laws.

Despite the fact that nearly one in three Americans are held back by a criminal record, the country isn’t talking about the issue. During Second Chance Month, we wanted the attention of opinion influencers, business leads, policy makers, and community leaders, so we unveiled The Waiting Workforce during our Second Chance business coalition conference attended by press, politicians and activists alike. The execution and location of the thought-provoking activation challenged what traditional advertising could achieve.

The creation of the statues is a part of our story. We subverted the actual legal paperwork holding millions back by using 1.8 million pages (or 10.75 tons) of it to build these statues. We went through several prototype stages, creating custom engineered armatures in order to replicate real poses of real people affected by the issue who we worked with. In the casting process, we met with over 100 people and listened to their stories to make sure we were representing the issue authentically. We secured three back-to-back-to-back federal permits utilizing the first amendment waiver to house our work directly between the Liberty Bell and the National Constitution Center, putting us in the historic center of America and birthplace of democracy. The structure was installed with laser-levels to a 2mm tolerance. All materials used are now being responsibly recycled or repurposed.

In the second week, without any paid media promotions, the campaign amassed total of 77.8M+ PR reach across media including national TV and radio with 51K+ unique views across the press, and 22.1M+ national coverage reach from news sites such as nba.com, generating $728.5K+ Advertising Value Equivalency with 2x awareness growth. The campaign gained a total of 2.34M + potential impressions across earned social. As a result, The Waiting Workforce campaign shifted more positive sentiment around JPMC Corporate Social Responsibility moves with 178% net sentiment growth from online conversation over a month and successfully spiked “Clean Slate Act” search term index by 1,029% compared to the month before the launch as well as the term “Second Chance Act” mention has increased by 143.9% compared to pre-launch. The impact successfully has nailed our objective of getting people to talk more about the Clean Slate Act.