Amnesty International uses the power of words to help free unjustly imprisoned people. In fact, Write for Rights is its biggest human rights campaign—a movement that sends thousands and thousands of letters to help free innocent people every year. Over the past 20 years, 127 of the 169 people who were the focus of Amnesty’s campaigns have been released from prison because of this initiative.

Quebec (Canada) has always been able to count on a highly loyal base of volunteers. However, the write-a-thon—which invites Quebecers to send as many letters as possible to help free innocent people—was showing signs of fatigue in terms of eliciting a direct response from the audience. We needed a new audience segment to be instantly moved by the cause, therefore motivated to participate in the write-o-thon.

The objective was to rally younger people, mobilize them around the cause and spur them to write letters.

In Quebec, the largest francophone community in North America, dictations are the number one school exercise when it comes to improving the writing skills of students. It’s a cultural learning tool in which students have to transcribe a text being read out loud to improve their French spelling and grammar. The texts usually used for dictations are meaningless, because the point isn’t the content—it’s the grammar. So we created the Amnesty International DictACTION, an unexpected in-class dictation experience for Quebec students to trigger the desired action of writing as many letters as possible to help free innocent people.

The texts of the dictACTION students had to write were genuine, poignant stories of unjustly targeted imprisoned people. This transformed a traditional school learning tool into a compelling and disrupting exercise to mobilize our audience in a very unexpected way.

Even before creating the DictACTION, we knew the success of Write for Rights would depend exclusively on the volunteers’ level of engagement in the initiative: more engagement equals more letters sent. Unfortunately, the program’s loyal audience was aging, so we needed to identify a segment that could become its future.

We turned to teenagers as the new segment to target. The task was daunting, especially when it came to getting access to this audience. The strategy had to achieve two tasks at once: build instant awareness, and create a compelling call to action that enticed young people to write letters to save lives.

We needed to think of strategy in a whole different way. We brought the cause right to where the audience spends most of their time—in school—and transformed a mandatory classroom grammar exercise into a shocking yet revealing experience. Through the DictACTION, students took injustice personally.

To bring the DictACTION to life, we wrote and recorded the stories of real prisoners, using the voices of local, well-known opinion leaders instantly recognizable to the students. The sound design—an element that had never been leveraged for this kind of activity before—deepened the impact of what the students were listening to: horrible human rights nightmares.

The DictACTION featured background rumbling, while sounds of people protesting, shots being fired and prison doors punctuated the narration. The element of surprise created a shockwave in every classroom we visited, sparking students’ desire to take action and make a difference.

We promoted the initiative by filming classrooms during the dictations and sent assets (the DictACTION Kit) to 324 schools that had an Amnesty International committee, inviting them to do the same. The recordings were also uploaded to Spotify so that teachers throughout Quebec could easily access them for free.

As a result of the DictACTION mobilization campaign, young Quebec students alone sent 40,384 of the almost 50,000 letters from Quebec to Write for Rights. This activation clearly boosted the annual results, with an almost 30% increase in letters sent. As most came from students, much of the success came directly from the campaign.

Most importantly, the mobilization contributed to a 75% release rate for wrongly imprisoned people.

Last, but not least, we invited Quebec’s Minister of Education to formally add the Amnesty International dictations to the curriculum of schools across Quebec. Discussions are still ongoing with Amnesty to assess the best way to deploy them in all Quebec schools every year.