Seria A side AS Roma switched from social silliness to seriousness as it used its digital reach, status and values to search for missing children.
This initially sees the Italian football team use its summer signing social videos to shine a spotlight on missing people – thus using its social presence for social good.
The club teamed up with two non-profits in the two countries – the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States of America and Telefono Azzurro (GMCN) in Italy – to generate publicity about and drive awareness of missing children.
Both organisations are part of the Global Missing Children’s Network (GMCN) – an international group that helps government agencies and non-profit organisations across five continents work find missing and abducted children throughout the world.
With each singing the team makes during the summer transfer window, Roma’s creative is used globally to try and reunite families.
Leveraging spiking football fan and media interest around their summer signings, each time Roma announce a new player they will include photos of missing children in their announcement posts.
The tactic sees the club release two videos per player signing: one featuring Italian children and one featuring American teenagers.
For example, when Roma announced the official signing of Juventus fullback Leonardo Spinazzola it rolled out a missing kids cause social video featuring seven missing children.
Official: Leonardo Spinazzola is now a Roma player.
This summer #ASRoma will use each transfer announcement video on social media to help raise awareness about the search for missing children globally.
@MissingKids@telefonoazzurro pic.twitter.com/sy9GheDhsg— AS Roma English (@ASRomaEN) June 30, 2019
The initiative actually draws inspiration from a surprising source.
“The idea for the new transfer announcement initiative actually came from reading an article about the 25th anniversary of Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’ video, which famously highlighted actual cases – with photos and names – of children missing at the time,” explained AS Roma head of strategy Paul Rogers.
“Taking inspiration from the use of milk cartons to display a photo of a missing child in America, the band’s video director Tony Kaye decided to use the medium of a pop video played on MTV and music channels globally to try and help find 36 missing children. In the end, I think they helped locate 21 children.”
“So, at As Roma, we thought, we could try and do something similar but updated for the social media generation. We have a massive social media following and our announcements generate incredible reach and awareness, all over the world, so we thought that at the exact moment when the world’s attention is on the club’s announcement, we could use our social media channels not for self-promotion but rather to help both the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Telefono Azzurro find missing children.”
Ernesto Caffo, president of Telefono Azzuro, added: “We are thankful to AS Roma for creating this opportunity to shine a light on the serious issue of missing children, a cause that too often receives little coverage in mainstream media.”
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Telefono Azzurro form part of the Global Missing Children’s Network (GMCN), an international group that helps government agencies and non-profit organisations across five continents find missing and abducted children throughout the world.
Ernesto Caffo, president of Telefono Azzuro, added: “We are thankful to AS Roma for creating this opportunity to shine a light on the serious issue of missing children, a cause that too often receives little coverage in mainstream media.”
This worthy initiative is certainly much needed. After all, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in the USA works on more than 25,000 missing children cases each year.
While the initial project revolves around Italian and US teenagers, at the time of writing Roma was also in talks with a British charity to extend the scheme to the UK.
Comment:
AS Roma’s social strategy is famous for several things: its creativity and innovation, its willingness to subvert and disrupt and its sense of humour.
Since 2017 the club has been focusing on doing things that other clubs wouldn’t be expected to do: to more original, more unexpected and weirder.
And the strategy and comic social media tone has brought Roma plenty of social success in the recent past.
Among its inventive, stand out social initiatives in recent years are its integrated, multi-phase ‘Totti Tribute’ (see case study),
to its ‘Barber Shop Challenge’,
its popular ‘Draw My Life’ series,
and its famous 2017 signing spoof spot ‘It’s Here’.
But this initiative marks a change of social direction as far as tone and approach is concerned.
And why not?
After all, once you have built a big audience, why not put it to GOOD use?
Links:
AS Roma
https://www.facebook.com/officialasroma
https://www.instagram.com/officialasroma/
https://www.youtube.com/asroma
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)
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