The Swedish Armed Forces are once again recruiting. They need young men and women for an occupation that in many ways is about giving up your own safety in order to help others. To highlight this, and to show the demanding nature of the job, we decided to stage exactly that scenario. We wanted to activate the target group while simultaneously raising the question. Would people sacrifice their own freedom for someone they have no relation to? Are people prepared to show that they care in ways that don’t include sharing something on Facebook or tweeting a specific hash-tag?

The aim of the recruitment campaign was to gather 4,300 applicants for 1,430 open positions. The event and the campaign helped site visits exceed 200,000 in just a couple of days. Social media, blogs, and forums quickly lit up with discussions concerning the recruitment campaign, and public service also reported of it. During a total of 89 hours that people could sit in the box, 74 people decided to enter and help whoever was in there. At the end of the campaign, 9,930 applications had been received. More than 2 times above the target.

To highlight the sacrificial aspect of working for the Swedish Armed Forces, we staged a scenario over the course of 4 days. We placed a box with an enclosed room in central Stockholm. A person willingly agreed to sit there until someone else took his place. Every hour a door would open, and if someone was there to take the place, he could leave. The question communicating the whole event was: Who cares? Because this time the only way to act was to physically take the place yourself.

The event served to highlight an occupation where you have to give up your own comfort to help others. And to make a real difference, you need to act for real. Therefore the event was streamed live on a campaign site from where visitors could do nothing to help the person. There was no status update that would free him, and no tweet that could make a difference. By having to take the place physically we presented our target group with a predicament and a situation natural to the Swedish Armed Forces, that they perhaps might never consider.