Mission: JOY

A mission to inspire joy, even in the hardest of times.

Impact Area

What We Did

Digital Strategy, Video Production, Virtual Event Promotion, Paid Media, Social Media, Influencer Management

Our team built the Mission: JOY film’s social media presence from the ground up, reaching over 800k followers across platforms to promote their Global Watch Event with 70+ celebrity co-hosts.

377m

social media
impressions

43.5m

video views

14.9m

total engagements
across platform

The challenge

Mission: JOY is a feature length documentary that shares the humor and wisdom of two of the world’s most beloved icons, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. These two Nobel Peace Prize laureates united for one final mission: to show the world how to live with JOY, even in troubled times. Both survived extreme hardship—including exile and Apartheid—but continued to live with JOY despite their circumstances. During the pandemic, it was our challenge to bring joy back into the world.

Our team set out to inspire more JOY in the world by coordinating a massive Global Watch Event for the film to show the world that JOY is possible even in the darkest of times. Our primary goal was to reach 100 million people globally in the first half of 2022 with our positive messaging.

Our solution

Mission: JOY engaged HelpGood to manage paid and organic social media, create additional content, and to build excitement for the film in the lead-up to the Mission:JOY Global Watch Event. We chose Facebook as our primary distribution network because over 36% of the world’s population is active on the site—especially in the Global South, where Facebook has a larger and younger reach than it does in the USA.

We specifically sought out to make our comments section as inspirational and engaging as the content itself—audience participation was a key part of our strategy, and you can see the JOY shared by our followers in the comments on many of the posts. We also engaged our followers for dozens of crowdsourced film testimonials, engaged influencers for collaborations, and created a crowdsourced music video for the soundtrack’s lead single, THAT JOY SONG.

Over 70 celebrity influencers & public figures signed on to co-host or share the Global Watch Event stream to Facebook, including Cher, Richard Branson, Kristen Bell, Jay Shetty, Prince Ea, George Takei, Melissa McCarthy, Forest Whitaker, the Nobel Peace Center, and many more. Combined, these pages totaled 138 million fans!

The Impact

Mission: JOY provides as much immediate benefit as possible to as many people as possible, while also serving as on-ramps to deeper conversations, and directing people to more support if needed.