Client: 'me too.'
Product: Social Activism
Title: Act Too
Media: Digital
Country: Canada
Date Of Campaign: Oct 15, 2020

Background: Sexual violence is a tool of oppression that disproportionately affects women. This issue becomes even more nuanced when looking through the lens of class, race, and sexual identity. A key ambition of the ‘me too.’ Movement is to connect would-be activists with local, grassroots organizations — often the most effective at providing inclusive support to diverse people and communities. It can be difficult to understand the patchwork structure of these organizations and how one might get involved. The near-paralyzing scale of this issue can make it hard to feel like individual contributions are making an impact. To address this, the ‘me too.’ Movement sought to follow the virality of #metoo with a broader invitation to participate, focusing on three key business objectives:VISIBILITY — Elevate the work of local, grassroots organizationsACCESSIBILITY — Connect everyday people with impactful actions they can takeTANGIBILITY — Give the community a measure of progressSTRATEGYACCESSIBILITY FOR ALLIESUnlike climate change, where impactful action is seemingly everywhere, actions to end sexual violence are less obvious. Our data acquisition strategy seeks to broaden the spectrum of activism beyond the prevailing understanding of what constitutes an action. PRESERVATION FOR ACTIVISTSThe history of this movement has been systemically silenced, altered, and erased. It’s why we know Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat, but not for her work as a sexual violence investigator. Our goal was to use present day activism to encode the past, while sending an immutable signal of this work as a beacon to the future. INSIGHTWhen a civil rights movement is perpetually silenced, people can’t know how to actively be part of the solution.

Idea: INTRODUCING ACT TOO The first recommendation engine for activism to end sexual violence – and a blockchain-powered archive that preserves it. CROWD-SOURCING GRASSROOTS DATAWe started by building a grassroots database of actions from organizations that included commonplace ways to help: volunteering, donating, etc. Our natural language processing engine identified and extracted the metadata from these actions. Then, it scrubbed search, social, and e-commerce platforms to find hundreds more. Some were closely related actions, but many more were unexpected - like reading a memoir or shutting down rape jokes. Finally, this vast array of actions were tagged by topic, interest, and involvement type to help fuel our recommendations.YOUR NEXT ACTRegardless of your experience or time, Act Too helps you find a way to participate in ‘me too.’. If you’re a busy parent, Act Too can guide you to resources for talking to children about consent. Or, if you’re a student it can help direct you to start a campus support group. And, the more you act, the smarter it gets. OUR RECORDED HISTORYActivism deserves to be elevated and preserved. To fight the systemic erasure of this movement’s progress, we used the decentralized, peer-to-peer nature of blockchain to archive every action facilitated by our utility to a permanent digital record. Every action’s unique 64 character blockchain ID also becomes part of our digital monument - a mosaic of murals celebrating the movement’s famous forbearers, visualizing the storied history of this fight and building a monument to the movement itself.

Results: BUILDING A NEW NARRATIVEAct Too launched on the third anniversary of the viral hashtag, garnering immediate global press and conversation. The campaign generated 1.6B impressions, reaching 48 American states and 71 countries in the first 48 hours. The work received praise from politicians such as Ayanna Presley, U.S. Representative for Massachusetts’s 7th congressional district, celebrities such as Alyssa Milano, Gabrielle Union, & Mira Sorvino, and even global leaders such as Melinda Gates. THE END OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE BEGINS WITH THIS NEXT ACTTo date, the utility has recorded over 54,168 actions to the blockchain, immortalizing thousands of acts in the fight to end sexual violence. 12,169 Learned12,812 Volunteered7,730 Attended Events3,899 Made DonationsAlready we’ve completed the murals of 33 historic moments, immortalizing thousands of acts in the fight to end sexual violence.