Every year, thousands of non-profits compete for contributions from individual federal workers through the Combined Federal Campaign. Our client at the United Way of the National Capital Area needed to make sure they were top of mind when DC-area federal employees filled out their CFC forms.
We started with a couple of insights into our audience. First, federal workers are kind of beleaguered — often the scapegoats of small-government talking heads. Our second insight was that federal workers truly are motivated by altruistic community-mindedness. They are good people in oftentimes thankless jobs.
So we decided to thank them up-front — for their service and for their donation. We came up with the idea of Everyday Heroes. We portray federal workers as selfless do-gooders, like Wonder Woman or Superman, aligned in their Derring Do with another Partisan for Peaceful Principles: the United Way!
We bought out a station domination in the Federal Triangle Metro station and even set the illustrations in the DC Metro (and gave the heroes ID lanyards), so federal workers that saw them would identify with the campaign. We also built a Facebook app that allowed users to put their photos into the Everyday Hero illustrations.
I worked on the strategy, concept, sketches, art direction, and typography and I hired and directed the illustrator through the project's completion. We were so happy and impressed to learn after the campaign finished that UWNCA donations increased — even though overall CFC giving dropped $3MM.
Illustrations by Kali Ciesmier
For the Combined Federal Campaign, we helped the United Way of the National Capital Area show federal employees as the superheroes that they are
