Case Study: Compelling content to raise awareness and reach your target audience
Client
Grassroots is a suicide prevention charity specialising in ASIST and safeTALK training. We provided the charity video production values that kick-started their campaign.
Industry
Charity – Suicide Prevention
Production Involved:
Filmed over one day in Brighton. Producer: Raha Danesh-Kazemi. Camera & Edit: Raph Goldberg.
Where the Video Can Be Found:
YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/GrassrootsCIC
The challenge
The charity’s director, Chris Brown, wanted to get this vital message across to a much broader audience – particularly young people at risk of suicide: “Ideally we wanted to reach people who didn’t know about us and didn’t know about suicide prevention – otherwise we were preaching to the converted.”
Our approach
We worked closely with the charity to produce a moving film based on the personal statements of those touched by suicide. Chris Brown feels that this is partly why the video is so successful:
Because the words are real, there’s a rawness about some of them … and being delivered by a human, with eye contact with the camera, gives a personal touch that is needed to really engage people.
— Chris Brown, Director
The results
The video went viral. It’s had more than 12,000 hits on YouTube and within 24 hours of publication the charity received an email from a young woman in the United States to say:
I am alive because, tonight, a friend posted your ‘I Am Alive’ video in his Facebook status…”
— Anonymous
It’s been watched across Europe, Canada, Australia and the US. When it was seen by a Cannes award-winning film director in Nunavut, he was inspired to remake the video in Inuit, because the suicide rate in this community is one of the highest in the world.
For Grassroots Suicide Prevention, the video has helped to reduce the stigma around suicide, encouraged people to seek help and raised the charity’s profile in the process.
We had no experience of doing anything like this, so it was a punt. And we are very, very happy with how it has gone… The number of hits and the way it keeps being shared – without any work from us –
is absolutely fantastic.
— Chris Brown, Director