2024 was a historic year for Smile Train. We celebrated our 25th anniversary and sponsored our 2 millionth cleft surgery. We earned our second GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS title in as many years and released a scientific report finding that our work has contributed over $69 billion to the global economy since 1999.
It was a no less historic year for our blog, Smile Train Stories. Winning the Shorty for Best Blog or Micro-blog was an enormous honor, but we knew we still had a lot of work to do. After all, public awareness of clefts, a potentially deadly condition that is also the world’s most common facial difference, still remains too low. Our blog, therefore, has an obligation to always strive to spread the word that clefts are serious, they affect people around the world and in our own backyard, and show the benefits of our unique model of training and funding local cleft teams worldwide in new and creative ways.
This year, we faced an additional challenge: telling the story of our 25th year and all we have achieved in a way that would bring new people to our cause.
Our chief goals for 2024 were:
From the jump, we already knew the best way to meet all three goals: continue to tell excellent stories that build empathy for people with clefts across cultures. As video stories tend to drive the highest engagement, we wanted to produce more of them this year. We hired local freelancers to capture video content from countries we have never shot in before, including Bolivia, Pakistan, and Madagascar. Of particular note, we sent our Director of Content Strategy to work with a local Indonesian filmmaker to capture the story of the 10-year-old boy who received our 2 millionth surgery—and his 50-year-old father, who received our 2 million-and-first.
Our increased focus on video stories did not detract from our attention to written stories. We continued to tell stories of patients and partners in the places we work (featuring narratives from more than two dozen countries in 2024) along with those of supporters and cleft activists across the US. As always, we told these stories in the first-person where possible, because the cleft community does not need anyone else to speak for them.
We also took full advantage of the special events around our 25th anniversary. We covered the two biggest tentpole moments of the campaign—our star-studded Anniversary Gala in May and Guinness World Record-breaking World Smile Day campaign in October—according to a keyword strategy designed to drive awareness of our brand and cause by maximizing the SEO pull of the celebrity names and landmark locations involved. This occurred as part of our broader project to combine AI tools with human creativity to seamlessly seed every article with juicy SEO terms.
Likewise, we continued our work with the analytics firm Knotch to learn more about how people are interacting with our content and further optimize every aspect it—from headline and article length to number of pictures to which articles to boost and so much more—to drive more and better engagement from new audiences while keeping existing ones engaged.
We are happy to report that Smile Train Stories once again exceeded expectations and found even more success after a Shorty Award-winning year.
After increasing 88% from 2022-2023, our total pageviews rose another 62% in 2024, surging past our 50% benchmark. And people continued to like what they saw. Knotch put a survey at the bottom of every blog article gauging how people feel about it. Our 76% approval rating in 2023 was already one of the highest they’ve seen, yet we surpassed it this year with an approval rating of 89% and a disapproval rating of 5% (a 55% decrease YoY).
The prodigious success of our blog strategy unexpectedly led to a more than 200% increase in donations made to story pages over the past year, which will help us continue our work and inspire even more new audiences with the stories behind it in the year to come.
