Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust Case Study

CHALLENGE

The Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust hired The M Network to help build a grassroots awareness campaign about the organization and to identify ways to coalesce the community around ways to help the least, lost and forgotten.

APPROACH

To get a baseline understanding of how the community viewed the organization and what type of communication gaps existed, The M Network commissioned a countywide survey on attitudes toward homelessness in Miami-Dade County.

Based on polling results, we created Homeless Awareness Day, a signature event that would eventually grow to be the nation’s largest single day social awareness and mobilization event focused on homelessness. The central point of the first annual event was a homeless meter campaign that provided the splash and the substance needed to gain instant credibility with the community and media.

Without any advertising dollars, we developed a comprehensive campaign leveraging hundreds of out-of-use parking meters. The meters would be used to collect the spare change people would normally give to panhandlers and serve as a jumping off point to deliver messages about the best ways to help the homeless.

The M Network created a Homeless Helpline card that was distributed to the masses by the hundreds of thousands – through individuals, chambers, churches, and at manned toll booths. We cross-promoted the Helpline phone number on the meters and in press materials.

The final tactic was to team-up with the second largest school district in the US to involve students with “cardboard brigades” seen along street corners throughout the Miami-Dade County – they became our mouthpieces for the homeless.

THE OUTCOME

So successful was the first event, that The M Network has been contracted to coordinate all aspects of this event for eight years.

We started in 2008 with a hand full of meters, department stores and a dozen brigades but by 2017, we can boast of a track record of successes exceeding expectations. For every event, we created grassroots programs involving more than 3,000 volunteers all across the County. That means in the past decade, we have made a total of 27,000 direct personal touches with individuals without spending a dime on advertising. Also of note, on Homeless Awareness Day, phone calls to the Helpline, spike more than 100%, and social media activity skyrockets more than 500%. The Homeless meters have raised more than $50,000 and provided untold amounts of publicity and messaging. Additionally, every year on this single day, we are able to deliver more than twenty new volunteer leads for area providers – an added bonus of our work that we gladly direct to the right homeless organizations so volunteers can get to work to help end homelessness.

M NETWORK CAPABILITIES DEPLOYED

Brand Strategy
Public Relations
Digital Retargeting
Programmatic advertising
Social Media
Design
Audio/Video Production