2012 aiga minnesota Design Show

Our brief was to do something cool and different for Leap Year, to promote ourselves, and to really flex the agency’s creative and engineering departments. We were working within an extremely tight deadline—the project kicked-off on February 7th and had to go live on the 29th. That meant that concept, design, writing, prototyping, development and QA all had to take place in about three weeks.

Early on we decided we wanted to make something meaningful and worthwhile. We figured that in a year with 366 days, everyone could spare 24 hours to do something good. Since space150 has an ongoing partnership with Second Harvest Heartland, we knew what charity the project should benefit.

Due to the time constraints, it was obvious that having something be available on iTunes and Droid Marketplace was near impossible. That’s when we started to explore what we could do with a web-based mobile application. Once we figured out that we could measure how high someone leaped using their phone’s accelerometer, we had our idea: we’d measure leaps on Leap Day, and turn that total distance into money for the hungry.

Delivery of Work

The channels were pretty standard (PR, owned social media), but the message was not. We needed to get the message out immediately, because of the 24-hour nature of the project. We had a small budget for promoted tweets, but aside from that it was all about press and word of mouth.

A couple days before Leap Day, we released a teaser video. It showed a bunch of people having fun using the app. The message at the end was simple, elegant and evocative: “We have an extra day this year. Put yours to good use. leapforloaves.com.” You couldn’t tell exactly what we were asking people to do, but it looked fun and drew people in.

The Results

The results were outstanding. We reached our goal of 1000 feet leaped, which meant that Second Harvest Heartland would receive the full donation. 1,887 people leaped 1,635 total feet. We had visits from 36 different countries, with over 104 hours spent on the site. The money we raised paid for 3,600 meals for hungry families across the midwest, which was the best part of all.