digital campaign
"Don’t Take My Care” Campaign
On March 4, 2015, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) federal healthcare subsidies. Essentially, this amounted to a decision on whether or not to strip away the healthcare subsidies that allowed Americans in 37 states to pay for healthcare.
Families USA, a national healthcare advocacy organization and a principle architect of the ACA, was in the national spotlight, leading the effort to warn the public and policymakers about this threat to the country’s healthcare system.
Working as fulltime staff for the organization, in four short weeks, Carla and Evan created and executed a digital campaign strategy to mobilize advocates, inform the public, and launch an interactive storytelling experience that authentically captured the personal stories of the people who stood to lose the most in light of an unfavorable decision.
Team roles:
• Carla: Director of Content Strategy (conceptualized the campaign, hired and managed the video producer vendor, managed the digital team)
• Evan: Art Director (designed all creative assets)
• Vendor: Brink Media (built the digital storytelling site and filmed/produced the videos)
Don’t Take My Care is an interactive social media storytelling experience conceptualized by Carla to encourage the public to participate in storytelling around the potential harm of an unfavorable Supreme Court decision. The video producers traveled across the country to interview 7 subjects, capture their stories, and then build an interactive video that highlighted the stories, gave users frequent cues to engage and share these stories on social media.
The social media tile board in Don’t Take My Care mapped out the national conversation around #DontTakeMyCare on Twitter, and created engagement opportunities on Facebook.
We designed social media graphics at various points during the campaign, including social media toolkits for activists and partner organizations prior to the oral arguments and promotional graphics for a live Supreme Court event. A big part of the campaign involved sifting through dozens of individual stories to pull out relevant quotes for different types of engagement.
Storytelling on social media was central to the campaign—and the ability to quickly record and post individual stories was an important way of capturing what was at risk for so many people. This required a lot of advance planning, but also a nimble, focused approach at the live event in order to push out the video content quickly and in real time.
Producing reader-friendly content for reporters and the public was a cornerstone of the campaign’s goal to inform the public on the substance and impact of a complex lawsuit. Carla created a content strategy centered around basic “explainers” on the substance of the law (aimed at general reporters and the public) and more specific, themed blogs that addressed arguments to the law as they arose in the news cycle. She also created a short video (aimed at the public) to better illustrate the “three-legged stool” analogy that the campaign used to explain the importance of healthcare subsidies to the Affordable Care Act.
