When families are ready to announce their pregnancies to the world, the first place they turn is social media, flooding people’s social feeds with ultrasound pictures, gender reveal videos, baby bumps, and birth announcements. But, is it that we don’t see on social media? The 25% of pregnancies that end in loss.

In fact, society tells us not to announce a pregnancy for 3 months “just in case” something happens. And when a pregnancy loss does occur, families must, therefore, grieve silently and alone. According to data, one in three women don’t feel like they can even tell their best friend about it, and 43% of parents experiencing a loss report feeling grief and shame.

A triggering social landscape can further reinforce these feelings, with baby-related social content and advertising there to remind them of their loss at any unexpected moment. Even though their search habits change following the loss of a pregnancy, their digital footprint doesn’t, which means once advertisers label someone as an expectant parent they continue to be targeted with ads for upwards of 540 days, making every trip online an extremely emotional one.

No Fixed Address’s client, Sunnybrook Hospital’s Pregnancy and Infant Loss Network, an organization that supports families who have experienced pregnancy loss, wanted to change this by breaking the taboo and unsilencing the conversation, while making it easier for families suffering through a loss to navigate their social feeds.

NFA knew that one in four pregnancies end in loss. Statistically speaking, this means that the experience was very common, yet not talked about. They also knew that women and families did want to talk about their experiences, they just didn’t always have the right words to start the conversation.

Their strategy was to create a set of tools to help start this important conversation online and get grieving families off the retargeting lists of eager baby product advertisers. They knew that if the PAIL network was the one to help normalize this conversation, families suffering loss would eventually find their way to us for support when they needed it.

The first tool they created was a piece of social utility called the “Unbirth Announcement”: a video that anyone who experienced a pregnancy loss could post on their social channels to share the news and invite the support of their networks. The video featured a raw and emotional poem read by a variety of voices, including lines like: “This is an Unbirth Announcement/ not a baby picture of any kind/ photo of a first smile/ or tiny finger wrapper around mine.” The end of the video had a simple super treatment that stated: “25% of pregnancies end in loss. Mine was one of them. It’s time to #UnsilenceTheConversation”.

Their second tool was a digital algorithm opt-out browser plugin. This utility helped families remove themselves from social media interest groups and email distribution lists. Their simple-to-use Chrome and Firefox extensions guided families in opting out of baby-related messages to avoid the painful reminders they brought. This tool also helped foster conversation, as it highlighted the need to stop retargeting messages and acknowledge a pregnancy loss.

Their true human insight and powerful CTA struck a chord, with earned media outlets, grieving parents, and influencers across Canada helping them earn over 56 million impressions to date, all on a zero dollar media budget. The initiative has been discussed at length on top news outlets like CTV National, Global News, CityNews, MSN and more, resulting in a 7200% increase in conversation from before the campaign launched.

The Baby Ad Opt-Out Browser Extension is the first tool of it’s kind to help families opt-out of parenting-related ads, permanently. After installing the Chrome or Firefox plug-in, families are guided through simple, step-by-step instructions for updating their advertising profiles on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and email. The result: a task that would otherwise take hours of searching and wading through deliberately obtuse advertising settings can now be completed in a couple minutes.

They wanted to make everything super simple. Their audience is grieving, and so their site gets right to the point. The video is priority primed for social sharing, and their browser plugin needed to be extremely turnkey with links based on your browser type.

They launched this campaign on Sunnybook Hospital's social channels and through a comprehensive influencer outreach program, including many family bloggers and influencers who have gone through a pregnancy loss themselves. All of the tools and videos they created lived on unsilencetheconversation.com.

The digital component was the driving force because it focused on the silent and hidden burden that impacts families who suffer a miscarriage, the triggers that perpetuate in the places parents look for distraction: social media and web browsing. Upon finding out about their pregnancy, many expectant parents excitedly plan by visiting baby sites and researching information, while their information is simultaneously collected by ad networks. In fact, the new parent segment represents one of the largest ad networks with an estimated 3.5 million Canadians included across major ad networks. These networks use the data they’ve collected to target them with ads for baby products and services. The new digital trigger remover is a guided browser plugin that walks users through the steps they can take to break out of the targeted ad loop that they’re trapped in.