Amid an agricultural downturn, farmers were suffering in silence.

Acceleron, an advanced seed treatment technology company owned by Bayer, noticed widespread anxiety among its customers. Four of five farmers and farmworkers said financial woes and fear of losing the farm were harming their mental health.

As one customer said, “We were growing food but couldn’t afford to buy it. We worked 80 hours a week, but we couldn’t afford to see a dentist, let alone a therapist. I remember panic when a late freeze threatened our crop.”

Acceleron and HLK, a creative and technology agency, worked to offer stress relief through #FarmStateOfMind, a cross-platform mental health initiative designed to:

• Break down the stigma surrounding mental health of farmers
• Connect farmers to the resources they need

With next to no paid media, #FarmStateOfMind used many channels and people to spark conversations. The campaign included Facebook and Twitter and a webpage with resources, as well as outreach to agriculture and general consumer news media, social influencers, mental health experts and agriculture associations.

Among the results:

• 9 million impressions on Facebook and Twitter
• Coverage in nearly 50 publications
• 4,500 shares and retweets on posts—compared to a previous average of 15
• The American Farm Bureau Federation took over the campaign, ensuring its reach expanded.

Last year, 62% of kids did not play sports, with the average kid “retiring” by age 11. For low-income children, participation is even worse.

Recognizing the health costs of this trend, ESPN resolved to tackle the problem.

Many kids drop out because the pressure is too intense and sports are no longer fun, ESPN learned. So the company launched a “Don’t Retire, Kid” campaign to create awareness about why kids are dropping out of sports, while driving parents and coaches to resources that can help keep them playing longer.

The campaign ran exclusively on ESPN for two weeks, after which other partners kept the messaging going on their own platforms. For example, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation designed billboards, newspapers ads and radio spots, and The Aspen Institute created a microsite to house resources such as a tool to help youngsters find the right sport based on health benefits and risks.

The campaign featured sports figures including the late Kobe Bryant and NHL legend Wayne Gretzky.

“Don’t Retire, Kid” generated more than 322 million impressions in less than a month, receiving a 99% positive sentiment on social media receiving 500 media placements, including coverage in nearly every major television outlet, Forbes, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.

Hate is a snake that can rear its head in any generation.

To combat this evil, USC Shoah Foundation and Discovery Education started a project to educate students about the history of genocide.

Drawing upon the foundation’s library of audiovisual testimony from survivors and witnesses of genocides, the Teaching with Testimony project empowers students to act for a better future.

The program invites educators, students, parents and communities to view powerful testimony from survivors and witnesses to evoke of sense of shared global citizenship and a call to make the world a better place. The effort includes a virtual field trip titled “Our Stories are Stronger Than Hate,” building off Discovery Communications’ “Why We Hate” show.

A marketing campaign—including social media, banner ads, blog posts and Twitter chats—exposed middle and high school teachers to program resources, which also included classroom activities and student community projects.

Since its launch, Teaching with Testimony has reached over 2 million students. The virtual field trip secured 94,000 views across 2,030 classrooms, and the companion curriculum was downloaded 765 times. On social media, the virtual field trip garnered more than 86,400 owned impressions. The campaign resulted in coverage in approximately 180 education trade outlets, garnering 50 million press impressions.

Realtor.com regularly holds hackathons to give product and engineering employees the chance to get together to solve problems not in the scope of their day-to-day work.

But what if the company threw open the doors to every employee, and invited them to put their brains to work for charity?

And so Hack-it-Forward was born, a combination campaign and event that our judges admired.

Realtor.com identified these goals:

• Fostering engagement. Help employees see their value on a team and that of their teammates.
• Boosting creativity. Identify problems local charities are facing that employees can help solve.
• Serving communities. Come together as a fully engaged workforce and give back to the locales it calls home.

Tactics included employee charity nominations, signage, intranet promotion, a T-shirt design contest that helped spread the word, and individual freedom to choose which project they signed up for, breaking down silos as employees worked across departments.

Results? For starters, 100% participation and engagement of a 2,000-person workforce. Together, participants made 1,100 blankets for Project Linus and assembled 200 education kits. In total, employees served 13 charities, making progress against homelessness, enabling education for disadvantaged youth, placing pets in homes, supporting veterans, empowering individuals with special needs, and bringing joy to critically ill children.

According to the CDC, suicide is the leading cause of death among those aged 12-17 in the U.S. Research also shows that one in four children are affected by anxiety disorders.

With that in mind, LG and Discovery Education wanted to equip teens with skills to create sustainable happiness. Its LG Experience Happiness platform, “Discover your Happy,” provides science-based tools for educators, students and parents to show how happiness can be achieved.

On March 20, 2019—the United Nations International Day of Happiness—LG and Discovery Education ran a nationwide social media campaign to spark meaningful conversations on the importance of happiness and provide resources and tips for happiness skills.

Program affiliates hosted two Twitter takeovers leading up to the International Day of Happiness. The first, held in February, and the second, a few days before March 20, primed social audiences with the campaign keyword #DiscoverYourHappy along with resources to inform the celebration of happiness on International Day of Happiness.

Twitter activity during the day-long campaign on March 20 featured five sessions to structure conversation around the core parts of the Discover Your Happy program. The following was part of that effort:

• Twitter takeover. The program’s affiliates—@DiscoveryED, @LGUS, @GreaterGood, @ProjectHappy, @Inner_Explorer and @SachemSchools—facilitated discussions for students and teachers in classrooms nationwide.
• Social conversations were created to garner authentic student participation through entry-level questions, Twitter polls and photo/video submissions. For example, students submitted video answers to the question: “Which happiness skill are you practicing and how has it impacted your life, your classroom or your school?” in a Twitter chat with @LGUS and @DiscoveryED
• Educators shared videos and pictures of classroom happiness celebrations

Results: On March 20 alone, there were 483 posts using the #DiscoverYourHappy keyword and 45,028,576 impressions. Pageviews on the Discovery Education website increased 230% the week of March 20 from the previous week. By the end of the month, the program reached more than 130,400 students.

Along with the Twitter campaign, a press release was published to share the news alongside an email campaign and mobile digital banner ads. The PR campaign was picked up by 175 news outlets, including American Public Radio and Education Drive, and gathered more than 51k impressions. The campaign amplified the existing organic reach of Discovery’s existing platforms, contributing more than 1.8m additional impressions.

A car that runs on water. A warehouse-based vertical farm that’s 390 times more productive than a field farm. A new way of recycling the million tons of clothing discarded annually in Japan.

Cofounded by famed British bank Barclays and the nonprofit Unreasonable Group, Unreasonable Impact supports entrepreneurs whose ventures have the potential to employ thousands of people worldwide while solving social and environmental problems.

Together the group created an Unreasonable Impact report to provide an overview of the program against these objectives:

• Supporting the most effective companies solving key social and environmental challenges such as emissions-free transportation and urban farming.
• Monitoring participating companies’ scale and growth in revenue, profits, customers and other vital areas.
• Creating at least 500 jobs each over the next five years.

The Unreasonable Impact report generated 6,925 impressions online, and internal and external report launch events drew a standing-room-only audience of colleagues and external guests. The later included companies such as Low Carbon Capital and Virgin, special advisors to the government and representatives from family offices across Barclays’ Private Bank.

A corresponding social media campaign to promote the report and VICE films recorded more than 85,000 views on Barclays’ LinkedIn and Twitter channels, while a series of sponsored Financial Times articles recorded 400,000 impressions.

For the transgender and nonbinary communities, the credit card in one’s pocket can misrepresent their true identity every time they are asked to present it, Mastercard notes. This can lead to harassment or denial of service.

In 2019, Ketchum and Mastercard created the True Name initiative—the first to enable people to use their preferred name on their eligible credit, debit and prepaid cards, without the requirement of a legal name change. By driving national awareness and positive conversation around the True Name initiative and its promise, Mastercard aimed to set a new industry standard for the community under the banner #AcceptanceMatters.

Mastercard partnered with the New York City Commission on Human Rights to turn the city’s iconic Gay Street in the West Village into “Acceptance Street” and simultaneously debuted the True Name initiative. The launch drew praise from the community and national coverage from CNBC, Reuters, ABC News, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Advocate and LGBTQ Nation, among others.

The announcement of the first issuers to implement the True Name feature sparked a second wave of coverage in national media, including The New York Times, Mashable, PEOPLE and others, sparking over 784.5 million additional impressions.

The initiative allows customers to present cards with confidence and pride, and attracts the attention of leading banks to be among the first to implement the True Name feature for their card offerings.

CopperPoint Cares, the company’s annual corporate giving campaign in partnership with United Way, has long been a major success.

But could that be sustained with the acquisition of a new company, Pacific Compensation? Vowing to keep up the momentum, CopperPoint Insurance Companies launched its first enterprise-wide campaign for community giving among the 500 employees of the CopperPoint Family of Companies.

An integrated marketing campaign was created to promote and bring companywide visibility and awareness. This included:

• Marketing flyers, posters and digital spots and more.
• Intranet stories, emails, electronic message board notes—and even custom break room puzzles featuring employee poster images.
• Incentives such as daily gift card drawings, a $500 airline gift card and pizza parties for high-participation teams.

CopperPoint Cares surpassed its goal of $115,000 by 20% with employee donations totaling $137,000 to United Way and other nonprofits. Combined with corporate matching funds, the campaign raised more than $270,000.

Momentum from the CopperPoint Cares campaign was so strong across the two companies, the committee decided to quickly expand the program to include a company-wide volunteerism project.

The nonprofit No Kid Hungry successfully created an awareness initiative that engaged corporate partners, consumers and stakeholders to raise awareness of the importance of school breakfast.

No Kid Hungry had two main goals for its Powered By Breakfast campaign:

1. Drive consumer awareness by making the campaign highly visible on No Kid Hungry channels and through earned and paid media. The organization hoped to secure three national and local media placements.
2. Engage at least five corporate partners to engage with the initiative and support it on their social media.

The campaign was launched with a pop-up event at the Santa Monica Pier. The event included music, swag and stationary bikes that powered inflatable breakfast foods, illustrating the idea of food as fuel. Corporate sponsors and brand ambassadors echoed the message.

The campaign drew multiple corporate sponsors, as well as these wins:

• Some 40.3 million media impressions, including media partnerships with Good Day LA, Romper and Mic.
• More than 3,400 social posts.
• Nearly 600 social posts and six blog posts from digital influencers, generating 12.6 million impressions. Corporate partners were featured in more than half of the posts from influencers.
• USA Today featured data from a survey conducted by No Kid Hungry and YouGov about childhood hunger in the U.S.

For the transgender and nonbinary communities, the credit card in one’s pocket can misrepresent their true identity every time they are asked to present it, Mastercard notes. This can lead to harassment or denial of service.

In 2019, Ketchum and Mastercard created the True Name initiative—the first to enable people to use their preferred name on their eligible credit, debit and prepaid cards, without the requirement of a legal name change. By driving national awareness and positive conversation around the True Name initiative and its promise, Mastercard aimed to set a new industry standard for the community under the banner #AcceptanceMatters.

Mastercard partnered with the New York City Commission on Human Rights to turn the city’s iconic Gay Street in the West Village into “Acceptance Street” and simultaneously debuted the True Name initiative. The launch drew praise from the community and national coverage from CNBC, Reuters, ABC News, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Advocate and LGBTQ Nation, among others.

The announcement of the first issuers to implement the True Name feature sparked a second wave of coverage in national media, including The New York Times, Mashable, PEOPLE and others, sparking over 784.5 million additional impressions.

The initiative allows customers to present cards with confidence and pride, and attracts the attention of leading banks to be among the first to implement the True Name feature for their card offerings.

As you might imagine, the leading supplier of communications cable in North America requires quite a bit of raw materials, resources and manufacturing heft.

Thankfully, Superior Essex Communications takes environmental responsibility and sustainability extremely seriously. To demonstrate its commitment to transparency and ethical sourcing and production, the company—way back in 2005—enlisted a third-party company to evaluate the environmental impact of its practices and products. Superior Essex has since used those benchmark findings to reduce the company’s environmental footprint.

In 2019, Superior Essex became the first and only communications cable manufacturer with certified Red List-Free products, meaning its cables contain none of the 800 chemicals considered most harmful to the environment and people.

Today, its products are “manufactured sustainably in a Zero Waste to Landfill facility,” and Super Essex remains fully transparent through ongoing independently verified material analyses. The company is also advocating for greater change in its industry. Superior Essex Communications has:

• Become a founding member of the Living Product 50 initiative’s Leadership Circle, a collaboration of leading manufacturers working to ensure that healthy, high-performing building materials with full ingredient transparency are the rule, not the exception.
• United with numerous Fortune 50, 100, 200 organizations in the Sustainable Leadership Forum, as organized by the Cymplx Group, to collectively evolve its sustainability platforms for the greater good.
• Joined the Materials Carbon Action Network (Materials CAN) to support education and action surrounding lower Embodied Carbon materials.
• Joined the Global Enabling Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), a leading source of impartial information, resources and best practices for achieving integrated social and environmental sustainability through digital technologies, to further encourage that same level transparency from our fellow manufacturers.

Superior Essex continues to set the industry standard for product sustainability and transparency in the telecommunications industry. It’s an admirable, ethical commitment that will hopefully inspire others to follow suit.  

Forests are essential both in providing habitat to numerous species and in consuming human-produced carbon that is warming the earth. To offset the carbon emissions of harvesting its pineapple and banana crops in Costa Rica, Fresh Del Monte Produce owns and conserves 9,400 hectares of forest.

To maintain biological corridors along streams, rivers and creeks, Del Monte is expanding the effort by bringing in NGO partners to help in conservation and extending corridors. The company grows seedlings and donates native trees to local institutions, NGOs, ministries and landowners interested in reforestation.

Every year, Del Monte also hosts tree-planting programs to educate the community about the importance of the natural world and how to work together to plant trees that are native to the region. At a recent most recent event in November, 240 children from eight schools planted more than 1,000 native trees.

In 2019, Fresh Del Monte achieved its goal of carbon neutrality in its largest banana and pineapple operations, receiving an official certification of carbon neutrality by SCS Global Services. The organization emitted 7,300 metric tons of CO² per year less than the forests absorb.

In the summer leading up to ESPN’s 40th anniversary in September 2019, it created “40,000 Acts of Service” to inspire employees to give back to sports fans through volunteer engagement. The initiative celebrated the company’s past and future, all while reaching its collective goal of community service.

To do this, ESPN:

• Created an internal site where employees could log their service
• Provided a toolkit to help arrange projects at team meetings
• Created competitive incentives, in keeping with ESPN’s culture as a sports organization

Employees quickly got to work, logging acts that included everything from picking up litter, coaching T-ball, buying ice cream for firefighters and taking an elderly neighbor’s trash out. Compared to the same four-month period the previous year, employee engagement rose 115% during this stretch thanks to the participation in 40,000 Acts of Service.

It takes real investment to influence the diversity of your community.

For Ally Financial, the team wanted to influence the discussion around bringing more diverse talent to the table, responding to a 2017 study that showed that only 1% of venture capitalist startups have Black founders. To respond, the team created the “Moguls in the Making” program, bringing students from HBCUs to compete in a pitching contest in Detroit.

The team also partnered with Sean “Big Sean” Anderson and other Black social media influencers to spread the message. Winners of the contest received $5,000 scholarships, a Macbook Air computer, and an internship offer from Ally Financial. CEO Jeff Brown was so impressed by the students that all 50 received internship offers from the bank, and 16 accepted for 2019.

The campaign also offered positive media coverage. An op-ed featuring input from Big Sean ran in the Detroit Free Press and the program itself drove over 218,394,168 earned radio, TV, digital impressions—with notable placements on BET, NBC, Fox and ABC Detroit affiliates, as well as Forbes, Buzzfeed and the Detroit Free Press.

The program also brought in 15 new Ally Financial employees from diverse backgrounds.

Amid an agricultural downturn, farmers were suffering in silence.

Acceleron, an advanced seed treatment technology company owned by Bayer, noticed widespread anxiety among its customers. Four of five farmers and farmworkers said financial woes and fear of losing the farm were harming their mental health.

As one customer said, “We were growing food but couldn’t afford to buy it. We worked 80 hours a week, but we couldn’t afford to see a dentist, let alone a therapist. I remember panic when a late freeze threatened our crop.”

Acceleron and HLK, a creative and technology agency, worked to offer stress relief through #FarmStateOfMind, a cross-platform mental health initiative designed to:

• Break down the stigma surrounding mental health of farmers
• Connect farmers to the resources they need

With next to no paid media, #FarmStateOfMind used many channels and people to spark conversations. The campaign included Facebook and Twitter and a webpage with resources, as well as outreach to agriculture and general consumer news media, social influencers, mental health experts and agriculture associations.

Among the results:

• 9 million impressions on Facebook and Twitter
• Coverage in nearly 50 publications
• 4,500 shares and retweets on posts—compared to a previous average of 15
• The American Farm Bureau Federation took over the campaign, ensuring its reach expanded.