Social campaigns: the best of the best

The initiators of social campaigns around the world from year to year try new tools and ways to find the path along which their message will reach the audience immersed in an endless information cycle. At the same time, the most simple idea can be the viral, and the latest technologies are not always a guarantor of success.

The most high -profile social campaigns of the last two years relied on the latest multimedia innovations and ancient but reliable techniques: simplicity and humor, and were increasingly created in tandem with professionals. We examined examples of bright and unusual campaigns for 2016-2018.

One phrase, one picture

In anticipation of the World Cup this year in the UK, a poster began to gain popularity in which a woman with a bloodied nose and mouth was captured.

The blood smeared on the face resembled the cross of St. George from the flag of England. The slogan sounded like this: “If England gets the thrashing, she will get it, ” and his goal was to draw attention to an alarming trend in British society: the presence of a direct connection between the losses of a football team and a surge of violence against women.

As part of the action of the National Center for Home violence in the UK, several such posters were prepared. On each there is injuries on female faces, in color and shape resembling the flags of certain countries.

The campaign quickly became viral. Several prominent newspapers of the country were written about it. Hundreds of thousands of people learned about the study of the University of Lancaster , conducted on the data of which this information campaign was mainly relied on.

#Knowyourlemons (knowing your lemons) is another campaign that managed to become viral thanks to the eloquent picture. Organizations of Worldwide Breast Cancer with the only photograph, using the example of lemons illustrating 12 possible signs of breast cancer, in Facebook alone it was possible to attract the attention of several million people.

The New York Times newspaper for its next campaign did not resort to any tricks. Her videos and posters kept on one simple slogan “Truth is not easy” (The Truth is Hard), and the focus of all the video was one single line that the newspaper summed up all the difficulties that the United States experienced in the field of information spread, protect human rights and balance between facts and fiction.

And the message of one of the latest social campaigns - “planet or plastic” on the covers of National Geographic magazine - was so simple that it was clear without any explanation.

Work with the private sector

Large and not very non-governmental organizations in their work increasingly resort to the help of professionals: design, marketing, web development-large and not very. Most of the most high -profile and successful NPO campaigns of the last two years were created with the support of specialized agencies, many of which performed this work Pro Bono.

End Youth Homelessness, together with the WCRS agency, has launched a campaign to raise funds for homeless youth. The British were invited for a day to exchange their beds for a sleeping bag and laying of cardboard to feel the hardships of a person spending the night on the street.

A series of bright posters across the country talks about dilemmas that people face in search of an overnight stay, for example, “would you agree to be beaten for a warm bed?”

The world -famous OGILVY agency has developed a flag and a marketing campaign for Amnesty International and refugee teams, which for the first time in history took part in the Olympic Games as a separate team.

This campaign won the Grand Prix of the international festival "Cannes Lions" .

A business sector is increasingly solving on high-profile statements, which thus striving to build and support the social component of his brand. Heineken in partnership with Human Library , the mission of which is to challenge the stereotypes in society, in 2017 they launched the “Open your world” video campaign.

In its center are a pair of complete strangers who have to complete the task together, and then find out each other better, talking for a bottle of beer. And not one of them suspects that his interlocutor and partner in this experiment is someone who adheres to radically other views on life. How will they behave when he learns who he is a man sitting opposite?

# We accept (#Weaccept) - a video about tolerance launched Airbnb . This campaign, as some believe, was created in response to discussions aggravated in the United States regarding migration and discrimination issues.

25sq.m Syria - a project developed jointly with IKEA by the Norwegian Red Cross. This is a model of an apartment with an area of ​​25 square meters - a real house in the vicinity of Damascus, where a family of 10 people live.

The goal of the campaign is to tell how people live in a country covered in a military conflict. Each tag in this "apartment" reported how to help. The campaign helped to raise $ 23 million for the Red Cross.

Humor as a mighty instrument

Social campaigns are often focused on recipients of help: their dreams, difficulties, obstacles standing in their way. Be the Match , an organization involved in the problem of searching for bone marrow donors, decided to go in a different way and focus on the image of the giver.

The organization’s database observed a serious shortage of donors among young men. With his campaign “Stay the Boy”, Be the Match sought to convey one message to potential donors: “Just because you are a young man, you can save someone’s life.”

Humor became the driving force of the campaign. Having gathered together extraordinary, funny, awkward heroes, Be the Match sought to show that each of them could become someone else's chance.

The British organization Batteers Cats and Dogs Home , which helps animals, successfully used the humor, in the video of which four -legged correspondents under the cover of peanuts and mysties are “tracking”, as a shelter works day a day.

"Unrivaled Empathy Machine"

So the United Nations has christened VR for opportunities that virtual reality opens in the field of transmitting a wide audience of someone's individual experience.

The UN project Virtual Reality Series has been operating since 2015. Within its framework, several VR films have already been created . The Dutch NPO Care , whose mission to provide women in difficult situations with the opportunity to start their job, recently launched the Walking in Her Shoes campaign (“To be in its place”).

Bold solutions

In January 2016, a scientific organization involved in the research of cancer, Cancer Research UK and Channel 4 decided to a large -scale experiment.

Firstly, the organ of the organization was on the air, and secondly, it was a direct broadcast of this operation-colonoscopy, and therefore was accompanied by warnings about shocking content.

The campaign was called Live from Inside a Human Body - “direct broadcast from the human body”, and its goal was to draw attention to the importance of scientific research of cancer and their influence on the success of medicine.

Steve Waugh Foundation in Australia annually holds a bike racket, the purpose of which is to raise funds for 400 children with rare diseases. Last year, a “bicycle without a cyclist” was created specifically for this campaign, equipped with cameras, motor and infrared sensors for autonomous driving.

He accompanied the race, representing all the children who could not participate in the action, and giving them the opportunity to observe the mileage from the position of the participant. Thanks to this campaign, the fund raised 850 thousand dollars.

The Australian project Meet Graham is aimed at reducing road accidents. Graham is a character created to demonstrate how a person should look and what physiological features to possess in order to survive a large -scale accident.

“Proleti bread, break the stigma” (Break Bread, Smash Stigma) - the campaign of the Canadian organization Casey House, which supports people with HIV/AIDS.

For her action, she opened a restaurant, food in which was prepared exclusively a chef with such a diagnosis. So the organization tried to counteract statistics, according to which only half of the Canadians is ready to share a meal with an HIV-infected person.

Casey House worked with one of the popular Toronto restaurants, and places at the table of the first dinner at a price of $ 98 were instantly sold out.

Brave messages

The new Oxfam film is called “A robbery that everyone is silent” (heist nobody -item ABOUT). He is about how large companies, evading taxes in poor countries in the amount that the organization estimates at $ 78 billion, deprives the local population of access to vital services, in particular, healthcare.

Future of Hate -a campaign that was launched by several organizations defending the rights of the LGBT community in response to the law approved in the American state of Georgia, discriminating the rights of these people.

Within the framework of FOH, a fake advertising agency was created that printed products with extremely provocative slogans: various signs and signs with inscriptions like “Jews are prohibited”, “we do not pour coffee Christians”, “no cakes of the Indians”.

Along the entire Atlanta, announcements “advertising” these products that could “need” the residents if the law had been adopted were hung. So the organizers sought to demonstrate how the future would look in which such legislative acts would have legal force.

All flyers also told how to contact the office of the state governor demanding to impose a veto on the law, which ultimately happened.

The new video of the PETA organization, opposing the hard handling of animals, was unusual for two reasons: because of the personality of the narrator who became RZA from Wu-Tang Clan , activist and vegan, as well as topics-about the personalities of animals.

The name of the campaign “There are no significant differences in us” (We are not different in the Any Important Way): He speaks for itself.

Movember launched a campaign against suicides among men - Unmute. ASK HIM ("Turn on the sound. Ask it"). Videos are in sound mode and are accompanied by subtitles, but if you turn on the volume, it turns out that the hero on the screen tells a completely different story than it seems at first glance.