On any given day, Primrose Schools — one of the nation’s leaders in early childhood education — acts as a nurturer and information guide for an incredibly passionate online community of young parents. This community is endlessly devoted to the growth and development of their children, making them highly sensitive to the information they read online that may positively or negatively affect their children. That’s why, when a targeted attempt at misinformation was spreading through the online parent community, Primrose had to quickly evolve from nurturer to protective parental watchdog, using content to spread truth and ease anxiety around the dangerous “MOMO challenge” - an alleged hoax involving hacked YouTube videos that showed the scary face of a female sculpture who encouraged kids to harm themselves or others.
Primrose Schools’ response to the MOMO challenge hoax was built to take advantage of the real-time content opportunity through content atomization, promoting the most appropriate creative to the active channels: social media, email and blog. The Primrose and Manifest teams crafted an immediately deployable story, “6 Ways to Keep Young YouTube Viewers Safe.” The blog itself was also built with an evergreen approach, so as parents begin introducing channels like YouTube into their children’s lives, they have vital tips to make it a safe activity. The social media creative aimed to quickly give parents tips. Tactically, Facebook played on the “marked safe” feature to draw attention to the tips and blog. Instagram used Stories and carousel formats to quickly relay the six key tips for parents. Twitter leveraged appropriate hashtags to seed the blog content into trending conversations. And email distribution drove direct communication with parents.
Primrose Schools’ proactive response to the MOMO challenge during the time of very active social conversation on the topic was successful and solidified the approach.
By the numbers:
23,000 page views in the seven days of the conversation and 28,500 for the year
Facebook: 12% engagement rate (yearly average is 1.9%); that is more than six times the average, and it was the third-highest performer of the year’s 125 posts
13,585 reach, 1,700 engagements (101 likes/loves, 6 comments, 27 shares, 1,566 post clicks)
Instagram: 5.6% engagement rate (yearly average is 4.3%); of 100 posts in 2019, it’s the 19th highest-performing post
124 likes, 2 comments, 5 shares, 9 saves, 25 profile visits, 2,196 reach
Twitter: 0.7% engagement rate (yearly average is 0.4%)
3,052 impressions, 21 engagements (12 expands, 4 link clicks, 3 hashtag clicks, 2 likes)
56% open rate and 9% click-through rate from the dedicated email (twice the program average)
Why is this initiative best in breed? Parenting in and of itself is stressful, full of questions and decision-making, even without the scariness of hoaxes and things out of parents’ control. Primrose Schools is relentlessly child-first and strives to build meaningful relationships with parents in every aspect of childhood development. That also extends to being there for parents when scary things do happen.
