One of the biggest challenges for The Human Project is persuading 10,000 New Yorkers to share a wide range of their personal data, from medical and financial records to geolocation and metadata generated from moment-to-moment as they go about their daily lives. To achieve that, we need to paint a picture of the better, brighter New York City that might be made possible through the simple act of sharing that data —  most of which is already being collected, bought, and sold without compensation or awareness.

At the same time, prospective participants are undoubtedly wary about the prospect of a data breach. To reassure them, we need to educate participants about the unprecedented steps The Human Project is taking to protect their privacy. Put simply: data security is The Human Project’s top priority, and their information would be far more secure in our database than in any other system where it is already collected and stored.

This document outlines the recruitment and enrollment strategy I devised for The Human Project and the many marketing resources I created to execute it, including the presentation template itself. It encompasses everything from the new visual and narrative identity we developed in partnership with Ogilvy to our print, direct mail, and digital advertising campaign and community outreach efforts that informed a full field test of the strategy in fall 2017. The results exceeded our most optimistic projections:

• 64 percent of target households opened their doors to recruiters, well above the 40 target door open rate for the study.
• 33 percent of respondents in target neighborhoods said that they had heard of The Human Project before our recruiters visited their homes.
• 45 percent indicated that they would probably or definitely participate in The Human Project study, well above the 20 percent target conversion rate and with no demographic or neighborhood effects; another 44 percent indicated that they were “unsure” but open to being convinced.
• Nearly 1 million impressions were generated by our social media campaign, including 221,000 video views; 120,000 people took action in response to the videos including website visits, shares, and comments.
• Visitors responding to our direct mail campaign demonstrated high levels of interest and engagement, spending nearly 17 minutes on our website and visiting an average 10.53 pages per session.