The Swedish Number

The campaign was in development for 2 years. Near a month before the campaign released, Visit Sweden left development, but the Swedish Institute joined development after.^[1]

On April 6, 2016,^[2][3] the Swedish Tourist Association, along with Intelcom, INGO Stockholm, and the Swedish Institute released the campaign.^[4] The campaign was released on the 250th anniversary of the removal of censorship in Sweden.^[5]

The campaign was supposed to be ended on June 6th if it didn't find a sponsor for the amount of money for maintaining the campaign's calls,^[6] but on July 25th, the campaign ended.^[7][8]

The campaign had a phone number (+46-771-793-336), to call random Swedes who signed up to be called on a website.^[9] In order for a caller to have a call, the Swede on the other side must accept the call through an app,^[10][11] and requests for calls only go to people who enable calls to go to them.^[12] Before the caller gets a response, a synthetic voice would say "You are calling Sweden, you will soon be connected to a random Swede somewhere in Sweden."^[13][14][15] All of the calls were recorded to prevent harassment.^[16]

The mission statement of the campaign was to create more interest to Sweden, to "connect people in troubled times,"^[17] and to recruit more people to work in the tourism association.^[18][19]

The campaign reportedly had 197,678 calls.^{[20][note 1]} With most of the calls coming from the United States, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.^[15][12][11]

One year after the campaign started, UNICEF, and Forsman & Bodenfors created a spinoff named "The Syrian Number," in reaction to the popularity of the campaign, and the effects of the Syrian civil war.^[21]

• Curators of Sweden – a similar tourism campaign