Help a Dane is a sun safety campaign that succeeded in changing lifelong behavior in the Danish population by getting the World to talk about Danish sun habits. An overwhelming 63% of Danes say they now remember vital sun protection on holiday as a result of the campaign.

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Denmark is a small country, and we love to hear what the World says about us. Our idea was to send out an appeal for help to the Danes’ favorite holiday destinations, knowing that if it could recruit volunteers and create attention out there, Danish journalists and bloggers would pick up on it and bring the story back to Denmark.

Assisted by a sunburned choir, tv- and radio personality Mikael Berthelsen read out a heartfelt appeal in local languages to the people of Thailand, Spain, Greece, Italy and France: Help a Dane in the sun.

Interested locals could sign up to become Help A Dane volunteers. The idea was that an army of volunteers could create a lot more attention than bought media on a small budget.

Our appeal films went viral and got picked up by primetime news all over the world, and overnight, Danish sun habits were talk of the town. The campaign spread quickly on social media and 12.000 people signed up as volunteers.

Some volunteers learned Danish and produced their own video replies, and Danish embassies abroad joined our cause. Local businesses and hotels made special sun-offers for Danes and handed out free sunscreen, local pharmacies guided Danish tourists to better sun safety and dermatologists offered free birthmark check-ups for Danes.

And exactly as we had predicted, all these stories returned to Denmark as valuable news stories while we used the user-generated content to entertain and educate our Danish target group.

We also did a partnership with the weather report on Danish national tv to use the content as a weekly feature through the summer.

More than 12.000 people - from Spain, Italy, France, Greece and Thailand - signed up to become Help a Dane volunteers. They downloaded our campaign material to distribute on the Danes’ favorite holiday destinations, giving us a reach that far exceeded our media budget.

Help a Dane grew from a PR stunt to an actual movement with more than 200.000 social shares and 2.4 billion media impressions.

But more importantly, 63% of Danes say they now remember sun protection as a result of the Help a Dane campaign.

The films sparked an abundance of user-generated spoofs, video replies and content. One Greek spoof video in particular went viral and won gold at the Greek Social Media Awards.

We knew that if we could make the World talk about Danes and their sun habits, the Danish media would pick it up.

So to recruit as many volunteers as possible, we supplemented the five appeal-films with carefully orchestrated PR and targeted social media work in order to create a buzz on the five holiday destinations. The use of (poor) local languages in the films was a deliberate trick to get attention from social media users who found the pronunciations comical enough to share and comment on. We then urged interested locals to become Help a Dane volunteers and supplied them with campaign material like posters and flyers to distribute on destination. This in turn provided us with a lot of content that we could then use to target the Danes back in Denmark.

Every year thousands of Danes travel to sunny destinations on holiday. Unfortunately, many of them return home with sunburns that increase the risk of skin cancer. And every day a Dane dies from cancer in the skin. After 10 years of sun safety campaigns in Denmark, we needed a new strategy to make the Danes change their sun habits.