Our challenge was how to make a brand of construction machinery as known as possible at such a large and varied market as Africa. We needed to find something that would engage Africans all over the continent – and we did! In Africa a strong social drive is growing: ”Africa for Africa” – a decisiveness and belief that Africa should and can rely on itself for its own prosperity.

With that insight we took the core value ”reliability”, shifted the focus from the machine to the reliability between people and created our campaign: ”Africa’s Most Reliable Person”. We encouraged Africans to help us by nominating their reliable everyday heroes – so that SDLG could give them the recognition that they deserve!

By using reliability in a broader sense we got a much stronger social drive, engaged a larger target group and still connected to the core value of SDLG.

The campaign was launched on September 1 and consisted of these phases:

1. Nomination

Nominations were made on an embedded Facebook post on the campaign site. Five finalists were selected using Facebook’s “Top comments” and an SDLG jury. The nomination closed in October.

2. Voting

Five finalists were further presented together with the reliable work they are doing for their societies. We urged people to vote for their favourite and help us crown “Africa´s Most Reliable Person”. The voting closed 31 December.

3. Awarding winner

The winner was announced in February 2016 and SDLG held a prize ceremony awarding him an SDLG sponsored project close to his heart. This was documented and shared.

4. Current phase

The winner, Kofi, has a dream project to increase road safety in Ghana. This project is now being realised, which has generated both PR and more content to share.

Reach:

Average audience/week: 3 million

Video views: 6,2 million

The winner, Kofi, has received a lot of PR. He has for example been a guest at the equivalent of the ”David Letterman show” in Africa.

Engagement:

Facebook fanbase, growth: 94% (from 89,000 to 173,000 likes)

Post likes: >25,000

Video shares: >5 000

Nominations: >800

Share of sdlg-africa.com on social media: >40,000

SDLG Africa website, increased traffic: 233%

Sales:

Increase in leads trough website: 20%

Achievement against business targets:

The campaign was not focused on driving direct business, but broad brand awareness. The main goal that was set before the campaign was that the video should be viewed 3 million times in all channels - and as we got 6.2 million views, we were very pleased with the result.