More than 4.6 million children and adults have a cleft but have never received any treatment. Children with clefts face life-threatening difficulties eating, breathing, hearing, and speaking. In fact, children with clefts are more than twice as likely to be malnourished as those without, and 46,000 children with clefts have needlessly died of malnutrition over the past 20 years.
As the world’s largest cleft charity, we wanted to raise awareness about the lifesaving importance of nutritional care for children with clefts by shining a spotlight on how one of our partners is saving the lives of these extremely vulnerable children each day.
We know that there’s no better way to demonstrate the truly transformative impact of our programs than by seeing them first-hand. So in 2022, we sent our Senior Manager of Social Media and Ambassador Relations to Mwanza, Tanzania to capture a candid, first-person account of Smile Train-supported cleft nutritional programs in action and what they mean to patients and families. She was careful to communicate the stakes of cleft care so the scenes were intelligible to an uninformed audience.
Once back in the US, she turned her footage into a medium-length video for Instagram and developed a comprehensive, multi-platform strategy to ensure it grabbed the attention of both existing followers and potential new followers.
We produced this video with the goal of engaging our social media community by striving for a light-hearted tone despite the heaviness of the subject matter.
Our metrics indicate that we succeeded!
This video garnered nearly 57.1k views, 2,237 likes, and more than 80 comments, significantly higher compared to our typical social videos—nearly a 716% increase in views. Best of all, this video may have even saved lives, as some viewers reached out to us about cleft care for themselves or their child, and we were able to connect them with free, local, Smile Train-supported treatment they did not even know existed.
