Case Study: Digital Rapid Response for the March for Our Lives
In April 2018, following the tragic mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the March for Our Lives emerged as a youth-led movement advocating for gun control reform. Just two weeks after the shooting, plans for a massive protest and concert in Washington, D.C., along with hundreds of sister marches worldwide, were announced. With major celebrities joining the movement, the digital strategy needed to match the scale and urgency of the event.
I was called in to lead the rapid-response digital strategy, which included building a team, creating a digital war room, and ensuring the offline event reached a global audience. The goal was to drive attendance, amplify survivor voices, and turn the march into a viral moment for change.
Situation
The timeline was daunting. With only weeks to plan, the movement faced several challenges:
Clarity of Purpose: While the marches had immense support, there was no clear digital call to action (CTA) guiding the public on how to participate or contribute meaningfully.
Coordination: Hundreds of marches and a major event in D.C. required centralized messaging, real-time amplification, and seamless coordination with local organizers.
Visibility: To ensure impact, the D.C. march needed to dominate digital channels while amplifying voices from sister marches worldwide.
Engagement: Celebrities were involved, but their massive platforms were underutilized without a cohesive social media strategy or toolkit.
To meet these challenges, the digital strategy had to be bold, agile, and rooted in real-time engagement.
Approach
Building the Team and Digital War Room
Team Formation: Recruited and trained a team of digital strategists in less than a week to manage content creation, social listening, and real-time amplification.
War Room Setup: Created a centralized digital war room to coordinate messaging, monitor trends, and respond to live events as they unfolded.
Driving Participation
Designed targeted campaigns encouraging people to find and attend a march in their community using a dynamic march locator tool.
Shared compelling graphics, survivor stories, and videos to inspire action and urgency.
Amplifying the Ground Movement
Live Content: Coordinated live streams of the D.C. event, ensuring the concert and speeches from survivors were accessible to global audiences.
User-Generated Content: Encouraged attendees to share their experiences using hashtags, which were monitored and amplified in real time.
Clip Distribution: Rapidly clipped and shared impactful moments from survivor speeches and celebrity performances for maximum reach.
Leveraging Celebrity Influence
Provided celebrities with a social media toolkit, including pre-written posts, branded graphics, and guidelines for amplifying the movement.
Coordinated celebrity posts in real time to align with key moments during the event.
Turning Offline Events into Online Movements
Highlighted the scale of the movement by sharing photos, videos, and stories from sister marches around the globe.
Used social media to elevate lesser-heard voices, including survivors from marginalized communities and local activists.
Result
The March for Our Lives was a landmark event in the fight against gun violence, with the digital strategy playing a pivotal role in its success:
Massive Attendance: Over 800,000 people attended the D.C. march, with millions more participating in sister marches across the U.S. and worldwide.
Global Reach: The live stream of the D.C. event reached millions of viewers, with viral clips of survivor speeches and celebrity performances shared widely.
Hashtag Dominance: Movement hashtags trended globally, with millions of posts amplifying the event in real time.
Celebrity Engagement: Celebrities like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ariana Grande, and Miley Cyrus shared posts and live content, expanding the movement's visibility to their vast audiences.
Unified Messaging: The digital war room ensured that the movement's key messages—centered on youth leadership, survivor voices, and actionable change—remained front and center.
By translating the energy of on-the-ground events into a powerful online presence, the March for Our Lives became a digital and cultural phenomenon, galvanizing a global audience to join the fight for gun control reform.
