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Computer manufacturer Lenovo has recently launched a campaign on the web called Pitch To Her, to empower rural girls through technology.
Though this is an India-specific campaign, it has seen a lot of interest from organisations and individuals from across the world – such as UN Women, UN Women Australia, Girls Not Brides, Adrianne Owings, Half the Sky Mvmt and Democracy Watch News.
The campaign is bringing to global attention YUWA, a social development platform for girls based in Jharkhand that imparts training in football, provides free education and creates awareness about social evils.
Hailing from the village of Hutup in Jharkhand, the YUWA girls are from a part of society where six out of ten girls are forced to drop out of school and become child brides. The girls came into the limelight on a national level in 2013 by bagging the bronze medal at the Gasteiz Cup in Spain. In 2014, they were invited to participate in the USA Cup.
This year, the mission taken up by YUWA and Lenovo is to empower the girls with technological knowledge that will propel them towards a smarter world. YUWA India Trust has therefore partnered with Lenovo to launch the national campaign, Pitch to Her, calling the brightest minds in India to enter ideas to ‘hack real world issues’.
As part of the project, the girls are using photography to show the world where they live and what they love. They are using 360-degree cameras to create a Google Maps Street View of their village: The YUWA girls put their village on Google Street View
Hutup does not even feature on the internet, so the first thing the girls are doing is to create a Wikipedia page, describing local facts and famous places, which they then aim to add to a detailed Wiki entry, along with pictures geo-tagged on the map: YUWA Girls Put Hutup on Wikipedia
While the girls were busy being introduced to and tinkering with technology, Lenovo captured their activity, made content articles and shared them for the world to see and invited the social audience to pitch cool ideas to the girls.
By mid-August, the campaign had led to:
This is a strong case of how brands in India and across the globe are moving from baseline to cause or hack marketing and engaging influencers to create real time content. Bhaskar Choudhuri, director, marketing, Lenovo India, said: “We are proud of our association with the YUWA girls. Despite hailing from a small town, they have the required firepower and understand that technology gives them the required platform to achieve their dreams. The primary objective of ‘Pitch to Her’ is to engage young individuals towards empowering the YUWA girls and in a way create an unforgettable, fun experience for these volunteers.”
The campaign ends on September 12.
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iAddress is a unique SMS/text function, developed by instaGiv – the charity mobile text specialist. iAddress changes the donor acquisition landscape by enabling charities to engage with and recruit supporters by text, complete with their postal address details to instantly grow their supporter bases.
The data collected via iAddress is fully owned by the charity and can be downloaded into prepared opted-in mailing lists at any time.
Fast and simple data capture means charities can reach out to new and different profile groups for supporter acquisition and immediately add new donors with postal addresses to their supporter database or CRM system. New donors recruited via text donations can be added to integrated fundraising programmes, for regular giving, donor communications and stewardship. iAddress has been successfully piloted for Macmillan Cancer Support and The Eve Appeal with impressive levels of response up to 70%.
With an easy to use data collection request added to a post-donation thank you response text, iAddress invites donors to text their name and postcode directly to the charity as part of the fundraising campaign or call to action. Latest automated address verification technology checks the postcode and confirms the address with the donor via a bounce-back text for 100% accuracy.
Iain Williams, director of instaGiv said: “As text communication becomes an increasingly agile and flexible route to supporter engagement and fundraising, iAddress enhances the channel’s potential for donor acquisition and ongoing relationships. By adding this function to text campaigns we’re enabling charities to do so much more than fundraising appeals for one-off donations. Creative and engaging campaigns raise funds and can now quickly and very simply grow your supporter base for ongoing communications via phone, text and post for fully integrated fundraising and donor stewardship programmes.”
Macmillan Cancer Support used iAddress to support a DRTV campaign launched at Christmas 2014. Text donations were followed up by a call centre but for donors who could not be reached by a phone call, Macmillan implemented an iAddress text that stimulated more than half of those donors to return accurate name and address information.
Macmillan’s Andrea Jones (pictured left), Individual Marketing Function manager – Acquisition Dialogue, managed the campaign. She said: “As part of the Macmillan Christmas Star Appeal we used iAddress to contact supporters who we previously hadn’t been able to speak with over the phone. It meant we were able to capture correct postal addresses and make sure that they received their Christmas Star on time. We experienced a response of over 50% and were able to add these individuals to our supporter database.”
The Eve Appeal ran a smaller and more targeted campaign and experienced a 70% response rate.