Meet Sittercity

The Key prides itself on being a true partner to clients in good times and bad. Since its founding, millions of families and sitters have trusted Sittercity to help them find child care or job opportunities. For more than two years, The Key has helped Sittercity build its brand as the most trusted source for reliable and safe child care. When COVID-19 hit and the company looked to offer its platform in new ways to help during the crisis, we jumped into action amplifying their efforts to help families run during this unprecedented time.

Creative Collaborators Through Global Crisis

COVID-19 changed daily life for American families and businesses nearly overnight; Sittercity knew parents working from home were scrambling to balance caring for their children and delivering on their jobs. For established players in the child care space, competition in the field grew.

Granted we earned our client glowing coverage for leading the charge in virtual-sitting, but we needed to update and iterate on a winning idea. Senior leadership at The Key worked closely with Sittercity's CEO and executive team to quickly ramp up their strategic media relations initiative. While the second wave of closures and lockdowns overlapped with the holidays, The Key — with special input from our North Pole Office — brainstormed critical seasonal questions, like: what do you do when you can't actually visit Santa to share your wishlist? Likewise, how can parents wishing for a break get a moment to prepare cookies for said Santa? Cue: Virtual Sitting with Santa.

Santa Has Entered The Chat

We counseled our client to extend their product offerings and donate more than 50 virtual sitting sessions with Santa. Our team ran with this moonshot and moved nimbly and creatively to execute one of our most fridge-worthy campaigns. The result: dozens of kids got virtual tours of Santa’s decked out toy shops and got to tell Santa if they’d been naughty or nice, while parents got a breather. This win magically extended to the press, who appreciated a story with a spark in the dark and stressful times of lockdown.

Naughty to Nice

Through strategic and impactful media relations, the team secured coverage with Good Morning America, ABC & CBS News, Forbes, Red Tricycle, Lifehacker and the New York Times creating a 10X increase in demand for virtual sittings in the last month. To date, Sittercity's gift of virtual sitting has received generous coverage in 144 media outlets and demand for virtual sitting is still continuing to grow!

Sittercity continues to be top of mind when people think about innovating in the child care space. As they continue to push the bounds of engineering solutions for child care, we are grateful for one of our most joyful campaigns and excited for what is yet to come.