Foster-SF 2024

Division of Labor’s third campaign for Foster-SF and the San Francisco Human Services Agency.

You might also be interested in our work for Marin Foster Care. See it here.

Foster SF Campaign: Keep San Francisco Kids in San Francisco

The Challenge

Too many foster kids in San Francisco were being sent out of the city. Not because people didn’t care. Because there weren’t enough foster homes. When placements couldn’t be found locally, kids were moved away from everything familiar: their schools, their friends, their communities. Foster SF needed to change that.

The problem wasn’t just awareness. If people didn’t see these kids as part of their own neighborhoods, they wouldn’t step in to help keep them there.

The Strategy

We made the problem local. Instead of talking about foster care as a citywide issue, we went neighborhood by neighborhood and made it personal.

These Mission kids. Sunset kids. Bayview kids. The campaign reframed the issue around a simple idea:

You Can Foster SF

By grounding the message in the city, the work turned foster care into something people could see, feel, and take responsibility for.

Creative Platform

“You can Foster SF.”

The platform connected identity to geography. Each execution localized the message, tying foster youth directly to the neighborhoods people recognize as their own. And it countered all the excuses like too small a house, not enough money, not married etc.

Execution

Neighborhood-Targeted Out-of-Home

We deployed billboards, posters, and transit placements across San Francisco, tailoring messaging to specific neighborhoods. Each placement spoke directly to the people who live there, reinforcing that foster care isn’t happening somewhere else. It’s happening right here. The work met people in their own environments and asked them to act locally.

LOCAL TV AND DIGITAL VIDEO

We told real stories of local people who stepped up and became foster parents. The localized approach made the content feel relevant and worth paying attention to, not scrolling past.

WEBSITE

We wrote and designed the website to reflect the design and tone of the campaign. Local, simple, human.

Results

We doubled our expected inquiries, increased our foster pool and got tons of volunteers. The campaign increased engagement across San Francisco and drove more people to the website to explore fostering locally. SFHSA does not share specific details, but we worked with them for multiple years on multiple campaigns so the work worked.

Why It Worked

People protect what they feel connected to. By localizing the issue, the campaign turned foster care from something abstract into something immediate. It wasn’t about helping “foster kids.” It was about helping kids from your neighborhood. And that changes how people respond.

About Division of Labor

Division of Labor is a San Francisco advertising agency specializing in campaigns that change perception and drive action. We help organizations turn complex social issues into clear, human messages that people can understand and act on. Foster SF partnered with Division of Labor to make foster care local and make action feel personal.

Overview

Foster SF partnered with Division of Labor to launch a neighborhood-focused campaign to address the need for local foster homes in San Francisco. By reframing foster youth as members of specific communities and encouraging residents to “Foster SF” the work increased awareness, drove engagement, and helped shift responsibility from citywide to neighborhood-level action.

Special thanks to the fabulous Julie Costanzo, Lou Weinert, Doug Brown , Ivan Miller and Chris Forrest and DoL’s Rebecca Reid, Faruk Sagcan and Luis Gonzalez.

WANNA KNOW MORE?

  • We’ve worked with the City of San Francisco since 2020 creating advertising campaigns to attract new foster families for kids in San Francisco. We’ve executed three successful advertising campaigns increasing the number of homes available for foster youth, building our pipeline of new foster parent candidates and finding new mentors and volunteers.

    With San Francisco being one of the country's most expensive places to live, it’s tough to find people with the space, time, patience and means to open their homes to these kids. This latest ad campaign was designed to focus on some specific misconceptions about being a foster parent while targeting certain ethnic groups and neighborhoods that had expressed interest via research.

  • Division of Labor is the ad agency for startups. We often work with tech companies, healthcare brands, consumer products, B2B companies, and more. But we always talk with our clients about the emotional triggers that motivate people to act. To potential foster parents, knowing they’re wanted and needed as they are has proven to be emotionally resonant. 

    It doesn’t matter if a person is gay, straight, black, brown, white, trans, rich, poor, married, single, divorced or whatever; you’re needed, whoever you are. The advertising campaign told simple stories about regular people who managed to change a kid’s life just by being who they are. If you can build a fort, braid hair or play with a stuffed animal, you can be a foster parent. No special skills. No language requirements. No neighborhood off limits.

  • We were hyper-local and targeted specific zip codes only with our buy. This was the first time FosterSF did local broadcast TV and it was a pretty big deal. The advertising campaign also ran on bus shelters and billboards in specific neighborhoods, as well as social media. It ran in English, Spanish and Chinese to ensure inclusivity. 

  • Past campaigns have driven hundreds of new foster parents into the pipeline. Our first campaign obtained 177 new potential foster families, exceeding our goal by over 75%. Subsequent campaigns continued with equal or better results. This campaign is too new to report results as sometimes the government works slower than startups! More soon.