Hunger at Home

Brand awareness, media relations, campaigns, PR

Challenge

Started in Silicon Valley in 2015, Hunger at Home was successful in executing its mission of channeling surplus food and surplus goods to homeless and hungry individuals and families, but was not well known by the larger community. Hunger at Home’s capacity to raise funds and generate community support was limited, and when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hunger at Home expanded their program model to directly distribute food to individuals and families affected by the crisis. Within weeks, thousands of community members were lining up several times a week to receive food, many for the first time. With the organization’s traditional sources of food also affected by the crisis, as the entertainment and hospitality industry shut down, Hunger at Home was caught between wanting to help, but not having the resources to do so at the scale required. PRxDigital was tasked with helping raise Hunger at Home’s profile in the community and to build its resources to meet the need.

Strategies & Tactics

PRxDigital held a press conference to publicize Hunger at Home’s food distribution effort. The press conference was held at Hunger at Home’s headquarters on a regularly scheduled food distribution day.
PRxDigital leveraged PR tactics to attract media attention, and arranged for print and broadcast reporters to interview Hunger at Home leadership, volunteers, and clients waiting to receive food in a line of cars that stretched for over a mile.

Results

As a result of the press conference, Hunger at Home’s story was covered by over a dozen Bay Area print and broadcast media outlets.
The story was featured on the front page of the Mercury News with the headline, “How Coronavirus Created the Bay Area’s New Mile-long Breadlines.”
The press coverage created a cascade of donations to Hunger at Home, kicking off with a PRxDigital-initiated $50,000 donation from Amazon.
Financial donations poured in from all parts of the community from large corporations, local government, and individual community members. What’s more, food distributors, grocery stores, and farms donated mass quantities of excess food to support the effort.
With very strong financial and in-kind support, Hunger at Home continued their food distribution effort throughout the pandemic, ultimately producing and distributing 7.5 million meals in about a year and a half.