With U.S. gun-related deaths up nearly 40% from 2012 to 2021, and a mass shooting almost every day in 2023, Americans had become numb to gun violence. To get noticed, our limited budget campaign, with little donated media, had to combate partisan politics and compete with NRA lobbyists to win votes in Congress. We turned to PR with emotional storytelling and a novel use of AI to grab an outsized share of national attention, motivating Americans to exercise their right to call Congress with just the click of a button.

Founded in response to the 2018 Parkland School Shooting, Change The Ref and March For Our Lives work in a relentless pursuit of gun reform. Today, gun reform is desperately needed: every day in the U.S., 120 Americans are killed by guns. Mass shootings, school shootings, suicides—these horrors are an inescapable part of life for every American. In 2023 alone, 43,036 people were killed by guns, while mass shootings rose to their second highest year ever. Polls prove a majority of the population wants sensible gun reform laws, such as universal background checks, yet elected officials refuse to listen due to pro-gun lobbying groups with more money to influence them. Despite the number of deaths and shootings, not one federal gun law was passed in 2023. One of the most effective ways to combat the lobbying groups and compel elected officials to make change is to pick up the phone and call them, but the problem is that those who have been killed by gun violence have lost their ability to speak out for change. Our answer was to break through the news cycle by re-creating the voices of gun violence victims using AI technology. Each voice was turned into a phone call that demanded change from lawmakers and could be sent through our interactive online platform, The Shotline. With the click of a button, visitors could trigger AI calls to their elected officials and join a national movement for responsible gun reform.

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 provide a clear and directly actionable way for citizens to demand change (i.e., calls to Congress) in a new way that breaks through the clutter.

Those most directly affected by gun violence in America have lost their ability to speak out. So we devised a 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. Then we launched 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 is an emotional and shocking way to break through the news cycle, and 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.

With the goal of having marquee media go live on launch day, February 14—six years to the day of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—we began outreach two weeks in advance. With our press release and campaign assets in hand, we targeted our earned efforts on firestarter national outlets (Associated Press, CNN, WIRED, Wall Street Journal, etc.) for embargoed interviews with Change the Ref founders and victims’ families. Our focus was on securing impactful coverage to maximize impact, drive traffic to the website, and boost engagement with an overwhelming amount of calls to lawmakers at launch. We then continued with targeted pitches to local and national media, sharing the latest call counts as well as breaking gun violence news. To launch, we held a press conference at the U.S. Capitol with the families of victims, where the AI voices calls were broadcast, with national media outlets in attendance.

In just two weeks, we secured significant awareness through 1,235 pieces of earned coverage and more than 2.5 billion impressions, including The Associated Press, CNN, NPR, Sky News (UK), The Guardian, USA Today, Yahoo News, New York Magazine’s Pivot Podcast, and a feature with The Wall Street Journal. The campaign was also featured as an Apple News Editor’s Pick, meaning it became a push notification sent to every single Apple News user in the country. The campaign was also recognized in trade publications like

Ad Age, Adweek, Campaign US, and MediaPost.

Most importantly, we moved people from simply vocalizing their advocacy for gun reform into direct action and engagement at TheShotline.org. As of April 10, more than 125,000 calls have been placed to Congress, reaching every single representative and senator in the United States.