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Addressing the SNAP Freeze

Operation Food Search has been a multi-year client that has partnered with AGency during some of their organization's most celebrity times (renovated and expanded office space! new program that serves even more people!) as well as during our community's most challenging moments (post-COVID food insecurity, the 2025 tornado).

OFS's governmental affairs staff raised the possibility that there might be a freeze in federal SNAP funds during one of our all-team communications meetings. We began by creating projected timelines and plans for what might happen if these benefits were in fact unavailable, gathering statistics that would be helpful to journalists and state leaders, developing local and national media contact lists, and creating response plans for food distribution. We also planned to seize the moment to host food drives and reach out to financial donors, securing gifts that would be crucial to addressing the unprecedented need.

Execution

·  AGency created an internal dashboard that was shared with stakeholders that included pertinent statistics, insights, and the latest news. This kept the entire team updated and served as a vital source of information for everyone as we worked to distribute information via PR, social media, on the OFS website, and to community partners.

·  We sent hundreds of press communications within hours of the shutdown taking place, sharing statistics and insights with local and national journalists who were struggling to humanize its impact

·  Within three days of the SNAP shutdown taking place, OFS was co-hosting food drives with partners in the business community that brought in thousands of pounds of food.

· We continued to update our media contacts during the weeks of the shutdown, doing media hits with outlets as diverse as Fox News and the New York Times. We had two front-page stories in our local, daily newspaper and earned millions of hits across the US. The coverage continued for weeks.

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Results

  • We received $2.4 million worth of publicity in October and $2.7 worth in November for broadcast and digital media. (This does not include print coverage. We know it was a significant value as we placed two front-page stories in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
  • We saw traffic on OFS’s website jump 10x on the pages that connected people with food.
  • There were at least 40 active food drives happening in St. Louis within a week of the shutdown.
  • The community broke records for online giving to OFS. The organizationreceived the most donations made in one day. During the week of October 29, there were 998 gifts, 402 of which were from new donors. 109 new $1000 donors, 28 new monthly giving, 257 donors in one day. OFS can track at least $2 million in donations back to our SNAP communications.
  • OFS’s MetroMarket mobile farmers market saw a 30 percent increase in visitors immediately after our communications campaign began.

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