When a baby with Down syndrome is born, the first words parents hear are “I’m sorry”. A hurtful comment that implies their baby should be pitied. We targeted the word “sorry” because it reflected the stigma that people with Down syndrome experience.
The Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS) had a mission: to stop people both in Canada and beyond from saying I’m sorry when reacting to the birth of a baby with Down syndrome and prove these babies are deserving of the same welcome and celebration as any other newborn.
We focused on 3 objectives:
· Awareness: Achieve mass awareness of our message
· Engagement: Engage a disengaged public about this niche issue.
· Perception Change: Change bias perceptions about Down syndrome that lead people to saying “Sorry”.
Down syndrome is randomly occurring, which meant we were targeting the general public across North America since anyone could potentially know parents’ of a child with Down syndrome. People who lacked a personal connection to Down syndrome and as a result still had outdated views of the community.
Down syndrome is a niche condition and as a result the general public are uninformed and unengaged with it, so we needed to provoke them to consider the issue at hand. But clichés about empowering people with disabilities had become wallpaper, so we needed to be unconventional or risk having our message be ignored. To truly make people stop and take notice that you shouldn’t say Sorry to parents of a child with down syndrome, we reframed “Sorry”, a typically thoughtful word, into the worst word you could possibly say.
To show that “Sorry” is the worst word you can say, we made “Sorry” a bad word. Showing that any off-colour, profanity-laden reaction to Down syndrome is better than“Sorry”.
Anything But Sorry, an integrated digital campaign, launched with a social video, “The S-Word”, that features people with Down syndrome offering humorously inappropriate suggestions to welcome a baby with Down syndrome. The video debunks stereotypes of Down syndrome as a struggle or burden by featuring real people with Down syndrome who by virtue of being their happy, smart, confident selves demonstrate that their lives deserve to be celebrated, not pitied.
With little to no media budget, our campaign relied on social media’s sharing power to spread awareness broadly within Canada and extend awareness outside Canada. To maximize our reach, we looked at what drove Facebook’s best performing content, which research showed to be humour. This led us to embrace the S-Word’s radically unorthodox creative approach for the category: edgy humour delivered by people with Down syndrome, an unexpected tone for “social-first” content to drive organic sharing.
The S-Word, launched during Canadian Down Syndrome Week, November 1-7, 2017, was the primary awareness driver on Facebook. Our Down syndrome cast earned mass PR coverage and Down syndrome influencers in Canada and the US spread the video organically. Viewers were retargeted with docu-stories of Down syndrome families affected by “Sorry”.
We also targeted the top-30 YouTube videos containing the word sorry, intercepting them with the first-ever language warnings. These pre-roll ‘S Warnings’ featured our Down syndrome talent warning viewers of the ‘inappropriate’ language they were about to hear.
Everything drove to a microsite where people shared colourful welcomes that were “Anything But Sorry”. Every share welcomed one of the 9,363 Down syndrome babies born in North America this year.
The S-Word even prompted one couple to share our video on Facebook to announce that their baby had Down syndrome, eliciting congratulations and zero sorries.
Anything But Sorry met and exceeded our objectives of driving awareness, engagement and changing attitudes:
Driving awareness:
- The campaign earned 1.3 billion impressions from 106 pieces of international coverage including 4 TV segments and stories in Huffington Post, Today’s Parent, and all of Canada’s major news outlets.
Driving engagement:
- Anything But Sorry’s social videos achieved a 62% engagement rate, beating our target benchmark of 10%.
Changing attitudes:
- In quantitative research, 77.25% of respondents said the video changed their perceptions of people with Down syndrome, exceeding our target of 50%. 3
Real World Impact:
- The most incredible result was that the S-Word became an inspirational tool for a couple to announce their baby had Down syndrome, changing the behaviour of their network of friends and family who welcomed the new baby with 100% congratulations.