The Swedish Tourist Association (STF) was founded in 1885 and manages hotels and hostels all over Sweden. Their vision is to spread knowledge of Sweden to Swedes as well as to foreigners.

STF's main source of income comes from membership fees and guest nights in hostels. Between 2007-2015 STF had experienced a dramatic decline in memberships.

In order to stop the decline in memberships a new younger target audience was identified. Research revealed that the new target audience were more interested in travelling the rest of the world, in fact this younger target was really not interested in Sweden’s natural outback, or travelling to it. Another problem was that Swedes by nature were not very nationalistic.

We needed to find a way to make them interested in discovering more about their own country in a less overt way. We discovered that while Swedes didn’t talk about Sweden with each other, they were more than happy express their pride and actively promote Sweden when talking to foreigner. So our key insight was – Swedes don't express pride about their country... unless they're talking to someone from another country.

Our solution was to create a platform for Swedes to have conversations about Sweden with foreigners and in that way instill pride and curiosity both amongst Swedes themselves and the people they spoke to. Who can better "sell" Sweden than the people who live there?!

The platform became a phone number - the world’s first number that led to an entire country and connected foreigners to random Swedes.

Our social media insights in combination with no budget for paid media resulted in a PR driven strategy. The PR effort was split in two launches - a national and international. Swedish people often read international publications and national media often report on what international media write. The strategy was to achieve a spin off effect where national media wrote about the number, then international media would pick it up and national media would write about it again.

The objective was to slow down the rapid decline in memberships by 25% and the outcome was 50%. STF saw a 7,5% increase in memberships via the web and 41,6% of these members came in during the 3 months following the campaign. They also saw a 70% increase in new memberships in the age segment 16-25 years and a 35% increase in members in the age segment 25-30, historically been the most difficult group for STF to reach. There was also an increase in renewal of memberships. The campaign, which ran for 73 days, will have an financial impact over five years with a ROMI of 6912%.

By initiating The Swedish Number and giving the brand of Sweden to the Swedes themselves STF created over 180 000 unique meetings between Swedes and people from all over the world and became one of the most talked about campaigns of 2016, generating 9,324 billion media impressions and an estimated PR value of 146 621 169 USD.