Heather Stiteler

THIS IS MY OATH

What do you do when it feels like your constitution is under attack? That’s the question I found myself asking in November of 2016. I decided to undertake a “little project” to do my part, and created a sharable video and resource site designed to inspire the everyday American become an every day activist. 

This was a personal project and there was no agency to help us out. I was responsible for much more than the creative. On this project I also produced both the video and the website, raising 2K to help out and begging for a zillion favors along the way. I learned to get scrappy and work fast - this all came together in 45 days. Getting involved was the right thing to do, but I learned a lot of new skills in the process.

In the end, our “little project” was a big success. In one week we netted 500K video views and over 10K site visits.

All on a $0 media budget. 

WEBSITE: After watching the video, people could link directly to the resource site where they could create a personal oath to share socially and then pick an issue to get involved with.

We built this site from scratch, creating several ways for visitors to engage with us. We also researched and wrote dozens of articles and issue pages to make sure we were accurately representing the facts.

These slides will give you a taste of what we did, but feel free to explore the full site here: This is My Oath

SPREADING THE WORD: We wanted as many eyes on this as possible in the week surrounding the inauguration, but all we had was a Facebook page and exactly zero media dollars.

So six of us sat in a room together emailing it to everyone we knew, reaching out to news organizations, and tweeting like crazy.

Before we knew it, we were liked and retweeted by a few celebrities - Michael Ian Black, Beau Willamon - and we were on our way to nearly 500K video views and 10K site engagements.

People everywhere shared their own personal oaths, and more importantly, took the next step and got involved.