DAVE THOMAS FOUNDATION
Shifting Child Welfare Beliefs
Changing minds isn’t easy—especially in a field as complex as child welfare. But with the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, Fenton set out to do just that. We launched a data-driven, emotion-forward campaign aimed at one key belief: every child in foster care is adoptable. By targeting skeptical professionals with powerful real-life stories and testing every step of the way, we shifted perceptions with impact. In just two months, we moved 8% of our audience from doubt to belief—many jumping multiple levels.
What We Did
- Strategic Communications
- Advertising
- Digital
- Message Development
- Research & Insights
- Creative
CHALLENGE
Research conducted by The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption (DTFA) in August of 2022 showed broad support among child welfare professionals for the idea that legal permanency should be the goal for every child, but gaps remain in perceptions of how possible that objective is in practice.
To address this urgent need to increase the number of child welfare professionals who not only believe all children deserve to find permanent families but also that adoption and permanency is possible for all children waiting in foster care, DTFA enlisted Fenton to develop a robust advertising and media effectiveness testing program.
APPROACH
Fenton and DTFA hypothesized that impactful, personal advertising about DTFA’s success in finding permanent homes for children would transform child welfare professionals’ beliefs that permanency is possible for all children waiting in foster care. To test this theory and measure the impact of our efforts we deployed a robust testing and advertising program that consisted of:
- Audience modeling to identify child welfare professionals who believe that all children should be adopted, but not all children are adoptable.
- Multi-channel digital advertising campaign delivered to our highly-targeted modeled audience to increase the belief that all children are adoptable by demonstrating DTFA’s impact using stories from real families.
- Media effectiveness testing to measure the effectiveness of our advertising efforts through online surveys.
IMPACT
Our efforts effectively shifted perception among child welfare professionals, increasing the belief that “every child waiting in foster care is adoptable” among all audiences with at least 90% statistical significance. Across the board, we moved 8% of our target universe out of disagreement that all children are adoptable to agreement that all children are adoptable after being delivered our advertisements at a high frequency for just 2 months.
Media typically moves respondents up one rung of movement demonstrating the minimum level of increased positive persuasion, for example moving from “somewhat disagree” to “strongly disagree.” This campaign exceeded those expectations and averages, successfully moving many individuals up several levels, for example from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” after being delivered our advertisements.
