Campaign at a glance
5M
Family, friend & neighbor caregivers
11.5M
Children receiving FFN care
7
Themed campaign days
EN + ES
Bilingual partner toolkit
Challenge
The Challenge
Over 5 million FFN caregivers — grandmothers, abuelitas, aunties, neighbors — provide care for 11.5 million U.S. children. Yet most don’t self-identify as caregivers, and they’re nearly absent from policy conversations.
- Invisible audience: caregivers don’t identify with the category.
- Infrastructure gap: advocacy was built for centers, not informal care.
- Crisis framing: child care narrative defaulted to scarcity.
- Under-represented: immigrant, DLL, rural, and BIPOC families absent.
The strategic shift
Recognition became the organizing idea: start with the caregivers families already know, then give partners a shared language and practical tools to amplify them.
Strategy
The Strategy
A distributed campaign architecture — one week, seven themed days, infinite local activations — designed around three pillars.
- Reframe: anchor launch to Grandparents’ Day so audiences discover FFN through their own lived experience.
- Recruit: turn partner orgs into amplifiers with day-by-day themes aligned to their missions.
- Equip: bilingual (EN/ES) digital toolkit makes activation friction-free.
Outcomes
What the campaign built
- Coalition: connected national bodies including NBCDI, NAFCC, Sesame Workshop and SEIU with state CCR&Rs and community organizations in one campaign structure.
- Partner distribution: gave every cosponsor a bilingual, day-by-day activation system they could carry into their own channels.
- Engagement: the “Supporting FFN Care in Uncertain Times” webinar created an on-ramp for partners and a resource that continues to draw traffic.
- Long-term value: established FFN Appreciation Week as an annual calendar fixture; partners began planning the next year before the 2025 campaign closed.
Strategic Takeaways
What carries forward
Cultural anchoring
Launch on a day audiences already pay attention to. Grandparents’ Day was the doorway into an unfamiliar policy category.
Coalition = distribution
A bilingual toolkit converted partners into a self-amplifying network. Ask: what can our partners say with us?
Build for repeatability
Every asset was built to compound. Year One created infrastructure, not just a moment.
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