BACK TO SCHOOL ESSENTIALS

About the Work In America, almost 15,000 children are killed or injured in gun-related incidents every year. People seem to have accepted this “new normal”, and focus on teaching kids how to survive school shootings, rather than preventing them. To highlight this absurdity, Sandy Hook Promise created a PSA that at first appears to be just another typical, back-to-school ad. But things take a darker turn when it becomes clear that there’s a shooter in the school, and the pupils have to use their new school items to survive. The PSA ends with the message that the only real back-to-school essential is learning the signs of a shooter, and stopping shootings before they happen. To launch the film, we engaged influencers, who released the film on their channels as a “back-to-school” film–without revealing that it was for Sandy Hook Promise. We also negotiated $2million in donated media, which helped the PSA become a trending topic on Twitter and receive 26 million views in the first 24 hours. It was shared by celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Mark Ruffalo, and was covered by 4,400 media outlets resulting in 3.9 billion media impressions.