Help Heal Veterans
For almost 50 years, Help Heal Veterans has been supplying arts-and-crafts kits free of charge to veterans and active duty military who are recovering from wounds, injuries and long-term psychological effects of warfare. These kits, often referred to as medicine that doesn’t come in a bottle, provide a creative outlet along with tangible therapeutic and rehabilitation benefits including improvement of fine motor skills, cognitive functioning, memory, anger management, dexterity, PTSD, and TBI symptoms.
With millions of veterans and active duty military on lock-down during the pandemic, the craft therapy kits were in high-demand. Requests were pouring in from VA medical centers around the country, military bases, state veteran homes and veterans who were isolated and alone. Heal Vets went into overdrive, shipping more than 90,000 craft kits to veterans in the first two months of the pandemic. They created a newly designed kit to help veterans make the masks they needed to stay healthy and safe.
But the good work of Help Heal Veterans was still largely unknown outside the community of people who care for disabled veterans and military.
Watch highlights from our virtual Operation Craftathon we hosted on May 23rd here.
To showcase Help Heal Veterans’ work and the benefits of therapeutic craft kits, Qorvis launched an earned, owned and paid media campaign.
On Memorial Day weekend, we hosted #OperationCraftathon, which brought together veterans, active duty military and crafting enthusiasts for a virtual mega crafting challenge led by crafting influencers. The idea was to build a sense of community among people in isolation and promote the healing benefits of crafting while helping people make face masks to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. We launched a paid social media campaign to promote the event and were overwhelmed with the response: We sold out of the 500 craft kits in less than 24 hours. We then increased the number of craft kits to 2000 and sold out of those in just three days. The event was a phenomenal success, and we were able to secure remarkable coverage, including FOX News, San Diego television stations KUSI, CBS8 and NBC7, Newsy and The Houston Chronicle. Not to mention 150 million media impressions garnered from a matte release. Additionally, Qorvis helped generate almost 4,000 new social media followers during the campaign and garnered over 700,000 social media impressions for Heal Veterans’ efforts during COVID-19.
Work
