Gold Shorty Award winner for Non-Profit
When people think of adoption, they generally think of adopting a baby or toddler, but 1 in 5 children currently waiting to be adopted from the U.S. foster care system are teens. Older teens have lower adoption rates and spend 50% more time waiting to be adopted than younger children. Moreover, young adults who age out of the foster care system without ever having been placed in a home environment are at a significantly higher risk for unemployment, homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse, and incarceration.
In 2019, Barbarian became AdCouncil’s new creative partner for AdoptUSKids’ campaign to support teen adoption from foster care.
In order to get a fuller picture of the teen adoption process, we talked to those who have experienced it first-hand. We spent hours talking to real families to hear their stories about teen adoption. We expected adoptive parents to tell us about the ways that family has an impact on the lives of the teens they adopted -- but what we found was quite the opposite. These conversations largely centered on the ways that the teens have changed the lives of these families for the better.
The Insight: While adopting a teen does have a set of unique challenges, there are also unique and fulfilling rewards that you can only experience through adopting a teen.
The Idea: You Can’t Imagine the Reward
We set out to show prospective parents these surprising and unexpected moments that come along with adopting a teen. Our creative focused on the small, but impactful, moments that cement a family together, and make it all worthwhile. Wanting this work to feel as authentic to the teen adoption experience as possible, and very slice-of-life, we took what we learned from the people who know it best -- families who have grown through teen adoption.
The campaign spanned across TV, radio, print, out-of-home and digital PSAs, and generated over 500M earned media impressions. On Facebook alone, the campaign hero video was seen by 2M users organically, with a 36% completion rate. Most importantly, the first month of the campaign drove over 1,000 people to request to be contacted about teen adoption via adoptuskids.org.