Your Neighbor Next Door Campaign

The “Your Neighbor Next Door” campaign was developed by Food Lifeline in June of 2008 using Adobe InDesign tool, acquired through an Adobe grant for $500. The Adobe software allowed us to design the campaign entirely in-house, which significantly decreased the amount of funding we needed for the project. As a human services non-profit organization, being able to develop this level of product for a modest investment was an enormous asset.

The campaign is aimed at showing the public the face of hunger and how familiar that profile can be, as familiar as your next door neighbor. The campaign is meant to both raise awareness for Food Lifeline and engage the public to act with a donation to help end hunger in their community, by detailing three faces of hunger: a school-aged child, faced with going to school without breakfast; a senior couple living on a fixed income faced with choosing between medication and groceries; and a working family of four who cannot pay for bills and support their children at the same time. It is an extremely evocative and effective campaign within our community.

This campaign is unique in the way it targets and challenges the public’s idea of what the face of hunger really looks like. Food Lifeline wants to change the public’s attitude that food bank visitors are only the homeless or the victims of their own bad choices in our society, and open the public’s eyes to the fact that the hungry are individuals like themselves, in situations relatable to everyone. This campaign allows Food Lifeline to help hungry people through our network of agencies (food banks, shelters and meal programs), and sends a clear call to action for the public to “feed hope” and support Food Lifeline’s goal to end hunger.
The “Your Neighbor Next Door” campaign was highly successful in that it led to a Public Service Announcement developed by a local broadcast firm and generated more than $19,000 in funding within five months time. This campaign also had a profound impact on the Board Members and staff of Food Lifeline, giving them a different way to talk about our clients and our work.

While brand awareness campaigns such as this one are hard to quantify, we have a great deal of anecdotal responses to identify these outcomes:
• Increased community awareness as reflected in an increase in overall fund donations, food donations, and volunteer requests.
• Enhanced the donor base with new and first-time donors.
• Increased the public’s understanding of hunger and the vulnerability of the community members.
• Provided staff with materials to communicate our message to their own stakeholders.
• Increased name recognition of Food Lifeline in community.

With the success of this campaign through the use of Adobe’s InDesign tool, Food Lifeline was able to both save on the expenses of outsourcing our campaign posters, and demonstrated how campaign materials can be produced in-house.