80% of people want to die at home—yet only 30% actually do. And 60% of people die in pain. Too many aren’t aware of their care options when faced with a serious illness or at the end of life, which can lead to heightened stress, financial burdens, and a death that isn’t aligned with their wishes. All of this coupled with the fact that as a society, we’re conditioned to fear and avoid death; we don’t know how to talk about it, we get uncomfortable during conversations around grief and loss, and we don’t know how to support our loved ones grappling with, or caring for, someone with a terminal illness.
Our client End Well, a nonprofit on a mission to bring life to end of life, came to us with a big challenge: how can we change this devastating reality?
And how could we do it during a global pandemic where we couldn’t rely on their typical in-person conferences to spread their mission? Two words: social media.
Our goals:
1. Reach more people via their social platforms, including a younger demographic.
2. Find ways to make end-of-life conversations engaging, relatable, helpful, relevant, beautiful, and shareable on social media.
3. Foster a community of engaged followers where people feel comfortable talking about grief, caregiving, and end of life and actively support one another.
So we can finally normalize these conversations and fall in love with every aspect of our one wild and precious life.
How do we get people to engage with a topic that we’ve all been conditioned to fear and avoid? By viewing it with an entirely new lens and finding untold perspectives that shows death isn’t a scary, foreign thing—it’s a universal human experience that unites us all.
Strategy
Our strategy touched on the core elements that make us human—humor, grief, surprise, entertainment, curiosity, compassion, education, and inspiration. After auditing End Well’s social channels, website, and digging through hours of footage and clinical content, we developed a specific plan for each platform that fused End Well’s unique mission with platform best practices, pop culture, current events, news, FIlm & TV, as well as captivating visuals and thumb-stopping copy.
We became end-of-life experts and utilized our extensive marketing and creative backgrounds to approach these topics with a fresh perspective, distilling them into concepts anyone, including young people and non-medical folks, could get on board with. Like a comedian performing “dead mom jokes,” a woman turning her father’s ashes into an hourglass to remind her not to cry over boys, and even a Barbie reference (cause duh).
Execution
We created a new, modern design identity and developed strategic content buckets based on End Well’s core tenets that would allow us to test diverse messages and styles while ensuring that we were doing what we set out to do—inspire a new generation to approach death with acceptance and curiosity; hold space for people navigating grief, loss, caregiving, or a terminal diagnosis; expose people to diverse perspectives and experiences that highlight the humanness and beauty in even the most tragic, gut-wrenching circumstances, ultimately inspiring people to live a life full of meaning to the end.
After testing different messages, styles, and types of stories, we started to find a formula that worked. And we doubled down.
We reimagined and reworked video footage from past End Well symposiums, found newsworthy articles that touched on end of life themes—from palliative and hospice care to psychedelic assisted therapy and human composting—scoured Tik Tok, TV, Twitter, podcasts for personal stories of grief, loss, caretaking, and terminal illness and brought these to life in uniquely End Well ways. We sourced stories from death doulas, morticians, comedians, musicians, showrunners, nurses, doctors, relationship experts, authors, celebrities, TV shows, films, books, articles—and explored different ways to turn the most powerful nuggets into captivating social media posts.
Not only did these posts reach millions of people, thousands shared deeply personal stories and powerful life-changing realizations in the comments, inspiring us to reshare them and ignite even more discussions.
In the 12-month period, we created hundreds of Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tik Tok posts encompassing videos, reels, carousels, static posts, tweets, polls, IG Lives, and strategic partnerships/collaborations. We shared daily on IG stories, responded to comments and DMs as fast as possible, and jumped on newsworthy trends and memes that were brand aligned.
In the time frame considered (August 2022 -July 2023), we:
Since the beginning of our partnership with End Well (2/22-9/23), we’ve:
We also helped launch End Well’s podcast and turned these compelling narratives into ad campaigns that generated 20,000 podcast downloads in the first 6 weeks with an average $.20 CPC.
We’ve increased engagement by over 200% MoM, with some posts generating thousands of shares and hundreds of comments and saves. Besides the impressive metrics, we’ve seen a community grow, connect, support, and lift each other up. We receive thousands of comments & DMs thanking us for doing this work. Witnessing the way this content and community directly impacts people’s lives is exactly why End Well is here and undoubtedly the most important metric of all.
