The Missing Children’s Network is one Canada’s leading child safety organizations – focused on preventing child exploitation, and child abduction. Part of their mission is to publicize the names and images of missing children – in one part to honour those who have are missing, but also in the ongoing hope of reuniting these children with their loving families.

A technologically advanced country, in Canada almost every media channel developed – from print to SMS to Dynamic OOH – has been leveraged in the effort to raise awareness of missing children. The challenge this presents is we had to find an engaging way to connect with Canadians in a new way that was relevant to them.

So we turned to a long established technology that had been previously overlooked.

That technology was: personalized postage stamps. Our innovation was designed to solve a problem: the problem of connecting missing children with Canadians in a new way, that was so ubiquitous that everyone could access it.

Created specifically for the Missing Children’s Network, Missing Kids Stamps leverages digital, art direction, storytelling, and public relations to create a website that allows Canadians to create and purchase Missing Kids Stamps. Users can learn the stories of the children being featured, create stamps that honour these missing children, and share their faces with the world. Instead of us sending a message, we found a way to let people turn every message they send, into a message of hope.

The long-term goal is that the platform will be picked up by other missing and exploited children organizations, and give them a new tool to use in their outreach efforts. Our platform will be freely shared with any other organizations that would like use the tool, in hopes that it will further the cause of honouring missing children, and further raise awareness of their cause.

As the campaign grows in awareness, it’s already delivered more than 220K social and news impressions online, and generated an outpouring of support for the Missing Children’s Network – all in its first few weeks in market.