The Offer: The Information Blanket, an LLC founded by London-based creative agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay (BMB), began distributing blankets in May to new mothers in Uganda. Each blanket contains easy-to-understand childcare diagrams and instructions for families without access to healthcare facilities. ?
The Data: Visitors to Theinformationblanket.org can donate $25 to the nonprofit to have a unisex blanket delivered to a mother in Uganda or they can buy one for themselves for $60, a transaction that also supplies a blanket for a Ugandan family. ?
The Channel: BMB partnered with nonprofit The Shanti Uganda Society, which promotes health and wellness for women, to help distribute the blankets. The campaign kicked off with BMB’s chief creative officer, Neil Powell, hand-delivering the company’s first 1,000. Powell tweeted and posted photos of the experience on the company’s Facebook page to drive awareness.?
The Creative: Each creative element printed on the blanket aims to provide functional value to a new mother with resources such as life-size diagrams of child size at particular ages and signs that a child may be ill.?
Verdict:
Ben Sutherland is global head of direct at media agency Mindshare, part of WPP’s GroupM. He works across Mindshare’s client portfolio to develop more accountable CRM strategies for brands worldwide. He was previously media director at Rapp. Sutherland is based in London.
As a creative solution to address such a fundamental problem as child health education, I can only applaud BMB. Conceptually, the sustainable and graphical way information is imparted is a winner. Distribution and targeting are a given via The Shanti Uganda Society. Not sure what a key performance indicator would be given that a focus group might be out of the question.?
