The Campaign

This is a campaign about how Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN), a non-profit organization to help find missing Australians, transformed the Internet’s most important feature – the search bar, creating an innovative, fast and direct channel to aid finding a missing person. ‘Help Find Me’ – a world-first, nationwide initiative, engaged both everyday Australians and major corporations during a seven-day campaign period to reach close to 43% of its total population to bring awareness collectively and help families and friends of missing Australians. With zero media investment, ‘Help Find Me’ earned over AUD190,000 (USD150,000) in media value. Most importantly, the campaign helped MPAN reached a much larger audience in its continued bid to raise awareness of Australia’s missing persons.

The Brief

For MPAN to engage the Australian community as a collective, concrete objectives were set: • Create maximum interest in the issue of the missing persons in the country • Reach new, broader audience in the country so as to widen the search of missing Australians • Get corporations based in the country to participate in the campaign • Communicate about MPAN and its mission Increase actions of Australians to share information, learn more, or get involved in MPAN’s efforts

Results

During the seven-day campaign, ‘Help Find Me’ reached out to over 10 million people in Australia, covering close to 43% of its total population. Average time spent on the MPAN asset on these websites was 1 minute 30 seconds, 3.5 times more than time spent on rich media banners. Fueled by participation of 6 major companies from corporate Australia, ‘Help Find Me’ gained further momentum in the country when MPAN and the campaign was featured in over 150 print and online publications, including The Sydney Morning Herald, the front cover on The Weekly Review, and by the Australia Broadcasting Corporation radio stations, aiding in the amplification of the message of MPAN across the country. With zero media investment, ‘Help Find Me’ earned over AUD190,000 (USD150,000) in media value. Most importantly, the campaign helped MPAN reach a much larger audience in its continued bid to raise awareness of Australia’s missing people.

Execution

In an effort to widen the search for Australia’s missing, MPAN launched ‘Help Find Me’ – a world-first, nationwide initiative with the potential to reach almost every Australian through the simple act of searching online. When a user lands on a participating website and uses the search function, the profile and image of a missing person will automatically pop up. A link to the campaign website is included for anyone who may have any information or wants to learn more, and get involved. In order to reach a significant portion of the consumer market, ‘Help Find Me’ partnered corporate Australia, with many companies ‘donating’ the use of their high-traffic website’s search bar for the cause. Companies including St George Banking Group, Bank of Melbourne, BankSA, and Mitre10 (Australia’s second largest player in the home improvement and hardware industry), are some of the major corporates involved in ‘Help Find Me’.

The plug-in that transformed the Search bar into a tool to help spread word about missing people was created for free. All the partner websites that ran the idea did so because they had donated their Search bars to the cause, hence no fees were incurred. As a result, faces of missing Australians were seen 600,000 times without any media cost. The idea generated free PR worth $150,000 and ensured that close to 10 million people heard about Help Find Me.

The Situation

38,000 people go missing in Australia each year. That is one person every 15 minutes. Missing people in the country is a serious community issue, one that Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN), a non-profit organization to help find missing Australians, hopes to eradicate by turning Australia into one big search engine to find their missing.

The Strategy

79% of Australians are online and search engines are the foundation of the Internet, allowing anyone online to bring order to vastness of the web in mere milliseconds. This gave rise to the opportunity to turn a web user’s first point of contact from a functional tool, into one that engages the community as a collective and help families and friends of missing Australians who might not have any resources or avenues to find their loved one.