In 2023, the U.S. experienced more than 43,000 gun violence deaths, and an 8% increase in mass shootings over 2020 (a record-breaking year), yet zero federal gun laws were passed. We knew we couldn’t change the law without changing the mind of the lawmakers. To do it, we needed to galvanize action that affected them directly.

To this day, the phone call is still one of the most effective ways of compelling change in Congress. This is especially true if the phone doesn’t stop ringing—the more calls, the better. Putting constant pressure on Congress members makes it impossible for them to ignore their constituents.

We needed to move away from typical awareness campaigns that encourage vocal advocacy, and instead create something directly actionable (i.e., calls to Congress) by giving citizens a tool that made it easier to demand change in a way they’d never seen—or heard—before.

The thousands killed by gun violence every year in America have lost their ability to speak out. So we devised a never-heard-before way to give their voices back. Using the latest innovations in AI technology, we re-created the voices of shooting victims from across the country, including the mannerisms and cadence they had when they were alive. Then we built a digital advocacy platform called The Shotline, where anyone in the country could—with just a few clicks—trigger the AI voices to call Congress, sharing stories of how they were killed, and demanding reform. To do it, visitors simply entered their zip code and selected a voice, which would then call their representative. The Shotline makes it simple to flood lawmaker’s phone lines, forcing them to face the true results of their inaction. The Shotline remains active, continuing to add more voices and place calls, until change is made.

We launched on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland shooting, knowing that, on that day, we needed to turn the typical remembrance-based news segments into a galvanizing push for Americans to engage with The Shotline platform.

We realized the traditional written pitch wouldn’t be as far-reaching as is needed to make change. Instead, we created an audio pitch using the AI re-creation of the voice of a student killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting, senior Joaquin Oliver. If our written pitches couldn’t cut through, perhaps the words from an innocent victim of gun violence would. And it did. We focused initial earned media outreach on three media segments: news outlets that had covered gun violence and mass shootings, political outlets/beats, and tech targets covering AI.

Over the course of three months, we worked with the families of gun violence victims to collect home videos, written accounts, and social media posts of their loved ones. With these resources, we re-created AI voices that accurately captured the voice and personality of those loved ones, and crafted phone call scripts that reflected the passions, hobbies, and dreams they had when they were alive.

We built a digital platform called The Shotline where anyone could visit to get a sense of who these victims were, hear their AI calls and—most importantly—easily send those calls to Congress. With just a few clicks and their zip code, people could flood the lines of their representatives.

The Shotline will continue growing, adding more voices of more victims. The voices will continue calling—again and again—mounting pressure on Congress, until gun reform legislation is passed.

Within the first month, the campaign reached +51K social mentions; 1,235 news articles across the country; and +3.6B impressions, all with $0 media spend. The campaign was the Apple News Editors’ Pick, becoming a push notification for every single Apple News user in the country. On social media, there was a 22% increase in gun reform conversation the following two weeks after the campaign launched.

Most importantly, we moved people from simply vocally advocating for gun reform into direct action. On the Shotline website, +100,000 calls were placed to members of Congress in just 10 days, reaching every single representative and senator in the United States.