The USAF and GSD&M call out volunteers

Volunteer rates in America have been declining every year for the past two decades. Volunteer organizations are asking for help, but too few are listening. So The United States Air Force (USAF) is stepping in and calling us all out.

The last official reports saw a seven percent drop in volunteerism in a span of just two years, meaning less than one out of every four people officially volunteered. Hours donated each year by volunteers has been in especially sharp decline, plunging from 52 in 2002 to 40 in 2017, and 26 in the pre-pandemic year of 2019.

In their new PSA campaign titled Call Out Volunteers, the military branch has teamed up with household names Jeff Goldblum, Tony Hawk and Sofía Huerta to encourage Americans to volunteer and help serve their local communities.

Created by the USAF’s longtime AOR GSD&M, the campaign will feature three PSA videos. The videos were inspired to look like an off-the-cuff, from-the-heart FaceTime or Zoom video, with each celebrity spokesperson asking those with the same name to take action and volunteer.

In one of the PSAs, Jeff Goldblum plays the piano as he greets viewers. He then makes a plea to “all of the Jeffs out there” and encourages them by saying, “Mentor kids after school, walk dogs at a pet shelter, plant some trees—the possibilities are endless! All you have to do is find a local need and volunteer.”

The idea behind this direction is that people are more likely to take action if you ask them directly and call them out by name, just like the training to call on people directly in an emergency. The USAF and GSD&M researched the most-popular names in America and narrowed it down to three. Then they tapped celebrities with the same name to help spread the word.

With just those initial three names (Jeff, Tony and Sofia), the teams estimate they will be able to engage around 27 million people in the United States.