We have been creating holiday videos for 10 years to entertain our clients with some holiday cheer and showcase our creative chops outside of healthcare.
But for 2019, we wanted to do something different.
We wanted this year’s video to bring warmth and positivity not just to our clients, Klicksters, and their families, but as many people as possible to help spread kindness and make it contagious.
When Kindness is Contagious launched in December 2019, Klick pledged to donate $1 for the first 10,000 YouTube views to the Fred Rogers Center, whose namesake is synonymous with kindness, to support the healthy development of children.
That goal was hit in mere hours and the video broke all previous Klick holiday video records with 6,000,000 views!
The article: “How a ‘kindness contagion’ improves lives, especially now” by Steven Petrow in The Washington Post inspired the concept for the video. The article references a study that finds kindness can trigger people to spread positivity in other ways.
The study originally appeared in Scientific American and shares results on how kindness can be contagious, stating that “people imitate not only the particulars of positive actions but also the spirit underlying them. This implies that kindness itself is contagious, and that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.”
When it came to creating the video, and writing the scenes, we looked for iconic, real acts of human kindness that had been shared online and then modeled our scenes after those.
Kindness is one of Klick’s cultural behaviors so creating a video about kindness didn’t just provide a unique theme for the holidays, it gave us the opportunity to inspire others in a way that was both very meaningful and on-brand.
We filmed our holiday video in November 2019 in and around Klick’s offices. Over a few days and nights, we transformed parts of our office into a hospital room and a locker room for some of the scenes; we took to the cold, wintery streets for a bunch of other scenes; and we even rented an apartment (for a day) for the final scene.
Like all our holiday videos, this one stars Klicksters (most of them acting for the first time). In Kindness is Contagious, they re-enact some of the most popular kindness videos on YouTube.
We see them performing random acts of human kindness like a stranger sharing a tissue on a subway, a doctor dressing up as Santa for a sick child in the hospital, a soldier coming home to surprise his daughter, showing compassion to the homeless, donating food to feed the hungry and welcoming newcomers to the neighborhood with gifts and holiday cheer. (The original YouTube videos play at the end).
The holiday video also pays tribute to Fred Rogers, the beloved and kind creator/host of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood preschool television series, asking viewers to share the video in support of the Fred Rogers Center to help continue Mister Rogers’ life’s work of supporting the healthy development of children.
Kindness is Contagious marks our most successful holiday video yet.
It received almost 6MM views, press coverage translating to 25MM earned media impressions in the first week alone, and led to a $12,500 donation to the Fred Rogers Center.
The video has already won multiple awards in 2020, including a prestigious Webby Award (Video: Corporate Social Responsibility category) and two MUSE Creative Awards (platinum for Corporate Video and gold for Self-Promotion) .
It’s supporting employee recruiting and retention and it’s reaffirming our clients’ decision to work with us.
Plus based on the feedback we’ve received, it’s also spreading kindness.
And that's something that we think the world could really use more of these days.
