America Is An Idea
THE CHALLENGE
A large portion of Lyft's drivers are immigrants. When immigrant rights were threatened in ways that were daily, concrete, and life-altering, Lyft had a choice to make. Stay quiet or show up.
Staying quiet wasn't really an option. Not for a company whose drivers were living the consequences. But showing up meant doing it right. Cause marketing is its own minefield. Done badly, it's a logo next to a press release. Done well, it changes how people see something. The risk wasn't just reputational. Real families were in the story.
The brief wasn't to raise awareness in the abstract. It was to do something useful. That meant providing thousands of free rides to immigration nonprofits across the country, real transportation to real services for people who needed them. And it meant making content that could carry the weight of what was actually happening, not a campaign that softened the edges to make it more comfortable.
The question was how to honor the complexity of immigrant life in America, and the very specific threat of that political moment, without reducing people to their circumstances.
THE WORK
Shachar started with the line that became everything: America is an idea. Not a geography, not a birthplace, not a paperwork status. An idea. One so powerful it pulls people toward it from every corner of the world. The campaign was built to prove that idea by showing the people who live it.
Five vignettes, shot across America. Shachar profiled five people whose lives cut through every cliché about immigration. Wilson, born in LA to Salvadoran parents, who builds lowriders and advocates for deaf Latino families. Zahraa, a Muslim single mother in Los Angeles raising three sons. Cesar, who grew up undocumented in Alabama and writes and speaks at churches about what DACA status actually feels like. Shervin, born in Iran, obsessed with American '80s culture in the most genuine way possible. And Mark and Jules, responding minute-to-minute to calls from asylum seekers at the border.
Not archetypes. People. 80% of the filmmakers, photographers, and writers who made this work identify as first-generation Americans or immigrants, many from the same communities they were documenting.
A digital magazine to house it all. Shachar built an interactive site that functioned less like a campaign microsite and more like a publication. Films, photojournalism, editorial. A place to spend time, not just click through.
A New York Times partnership. Shachar identified a contextual print placement in the Times' immigration issue and built a digital masthead to run alongside it. The work appearing there, in that issue, mattered as much as the ad itself.
Influencer dinners at immigrant-owned restaurants. Working with The Infatuation, we hosted dinners at Guelaguetza in LA, Garcia's Seafood Grille in Miami, and Galaza's in New York. RAICES representatives joined each one and shared what they were actually dealing with at the border, in real time.
Round Up and Donate. Lyft users could opt in to rounding up their fare and donating to immigration nonprofits. The campaign drove the biggest spike in opt-ins the program had ever seen.
THE RESULT
The campaign did what it set out to do: it moved people, and it moved resources.
Key outcomes:
Biggest spike in Round Up and Donate opt-ins in the program's history
Thousands of free rides delivered to immigration nonprofits and their clients across the country
Webby Award, Best Corporate Social Responsibility
Featured in Communication Arts, Lürzer's Archive, Shots Magazine
Vimeo Pick of the Month
FWA Site of the Day
Coverage across national press and cultural media
The editorial strategy worked because the content deserved to exist beyond the campaign. A film about Wilson's lowriders and his kids. A piece about what it's like to wait for asylum. A story about Cesar standing in front of a congregation being told he's living in sin. These weren't brand films. They were portraits.
When 80% of the people making the work come from the communities in the work, it shows. Not as a credential but as a quality. The difference between a campaign about immigrants and a campaign made with them is visible in every frame.
Lyft didn't just say something. They built something, funded something, drove something. That's the gap between showing up and showing up.
