One out of every four students reports being bullied during the school year. Four out of ten have experienced online harassment – young adults and young women are more vulnerable. Racial tensions in the US are at an all-time high – doubling in the past two years. There's a lot of hate happening in the world and specifically on the internet. Brita, the makers of water filtration products, helps you filter out the bad so that you can get to the good. Through The Filtered Life campaign, Brita set out to filter out the online haters. The PR team executed against the following objectives:
In bringing The Filtered Life to life, we looked at many areas of opportunity but ultimately landed on the internet because of where it began and the reality of where it currently is. The Internet should be a safe place to be creative, collaborate with others and cheer on our favorites. But unfortunately, we're seeing more and more cases of mean-spirited efforts to hurt other people, with many of these instances involving kids.
Stephen Curry has innovated basketball and is now focused on innovating technology – via social and via connections. He's on the forefront of technology both for engagement with his fans and life beyond basketball. He's a proponent of the internet for good. As a person who has experienced online hate, he provided a relatable voice to the campaign. To help educate consumers, we partnered with The Cybersmile Foundation, an international cyberbullying non-profit organization. They are leading the global conversation around the issue and work directly with youth and adults alike through programming and resources offerings.
Brita is committed to making water safe to drink and good for the whole family. The internet should be the same. The more we can raise awareness, fund education and self-filter, the faster we can filter out the bad so we can enjoy the good things about the internet. The campaign launched with a Filtered Life video series in early 2016, which featured people telling their unique, individual stories of overcoming negativity, hate and bullying in different ways. Brita also created the Filter Your Feed tool, which was an online app that allowed people to scrub their Twitter history for words that could be negative and let them delete a post they may have regretted. We then served up some fun stuff to replace it and put the good back into the internet like Stephen Curry with puppies and ice cream.
In April, Stephen helped launch and participated in Filter Your Feed, inviting people to remove something negative from their feeds and replace it with positive content to make the internet a happier place. For every share of #FilterYourFeed Brita donated $1 to The Cybersmile Foundation. We generated broad awareness through a segment on CBS' The Late Late Show with James Corden, in which Curry talked about Brita's efforts to help eliminate online bullying and how people can get involved. Influencers and Curry helped drive traffic to the tool and program awareness on Twitter. Additional media coverage, including a PEOPLE magazine interview with Curry, helped drive program messaging and traffic to the Filter Your Feed tool. Through this campaign, Brita donated more than $80,000 to The Cybersmile Foundation to support their educational programming and efforts.
Through the Filtered Life, we achieved all of our goals and helped put a spotlight on a truly important, pressing issue.
