The Digital Canvass | Get Homicide Tips | Programmatic Investigations

DIGITAL CANVASS
CASE STUDY

CLIENT: SAN BERNARDINO POLICE DEPARTMENT
MARCH, 2018

Laura Perez Homicide

Oriana Taylor Homicide

Angel Valdivia Homicide

We teamed up with the San Bernardino Police Department (SBPD) to launch our first Digital Canvass Campaign. Below are the first three videos we developed and created for the department over a three month period from December 2017 to March 2018. While we cannot comment on the department's ongoing cases, valuable tips were received and the public engagement was at a record high on the department's social media. Below we outline some of our strategies and results.

DIGITAL CANVASS |

Angel Valdivia Homicide

DIGITAL CANVASS |

Oriana Taylor Homicide

DIGITAL CANVASS |

Laura Perez Homicide

OBJECTIVE

The SBPD protects and serves a community of just over 260,000 residents. Having come out of bankruptcy in 2017 and surviving a mass shooting in 2015, the department has become an example of resilience to cities and police departments all over the country.

We approached the department with our Digital Video Canvassing with the goal of providing homicide detectives an online investigation tool that will help illicit public tips while also building social media engagement and department trust. Shot in a true-crime documentary style similar to the most popular programs on television, these videos combined investigator and family interviews along with informational graphics and text. Once the videos were produced and approved by the SBPD, Programmatic Investigations posted and activated the videos on social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube. Activating these videos included social media programmatic marketing tactics that targeted viewers in specific neighborhoods, communities, or locations investigators believe viewers, aka tipsters, were most likely to have important case information.

Our work with the San Bernardino Police Department is groundbreaking and our case study is ongoing. More results are expected to be posted in the future (July 2018).

RESULTS

Videos: 3
Views: 80,000
- 30K x Organic Views
- 50K x Programmatic Views
Video Shares: 473
Comments and Reactions: 382
Tip Submissions: Yes
500% total increase in Facebook engagement based on the department's prior top organic video views of 4,500 compared to 21,000 for the most organically viewed Digital Canvass video.

WHAT DOES THE DEPARTMENT SAY?

The San Bernardino Police Department is a progressive department that strives to be a leader in policing with technology and social media being an important avenue for our relationship with the public we serve. As the investigations division looked for new ways to reach the public to gain information on high profile cases, specifically homicides, we turned to programmatic investigations and the digital canvass video.

The Digital Canvass is a high-quality video designed to elicit tips from the public by telling the story of the crime, the victim, and the victim's loved one's perspective. These videos are then targeted to a specific geographic and psychographic audience on social media, such as Facebook and YouTube, asking the public to submit tips to the department's dedicated tip hotline.

The Digital Canvass melded with our department’s vision of reaching the public more effectively and to my knowledge, no one in the industry is doing what Mr. Hopkins has brought to the table. With these videos, we reached thousands of viewers in our targeted communities in a few days and received many positive comments from the public and appreciation from the families. Most importantly, we received information on a homicide that advanced the investigation in a way that we likely would not have, if it were not for the use of these targeted videos.

These videos are helpful to cases that are challenging or have reached an investigative stopping point due to a lack of leads. I can see them being used in other types of cases as well, such as missing persons, series crimes, and cold cases. Many man-hours can be saved in reaching out to the public with a digital canvass and since the outreach is targeted, i consider it more effective than a traditional press release. With this targeted outreach, we have increased saturation and saved considerable money and resources over sending investigators out into the field seeking information. To be clear, it is not a replacement of traditional work, but a leading-edge enhancement to investigations.

Overall, we found the digital canvass process to be minimally invasive to the department and took little time from the investigators and supervisors. Furthermore, Mr. Hopkins understands how to relate to the demands of law enforcement professionals, which helped keep timelines very manageable. We found value in the digital canvass videos and will use them again for future investigations.