Our purpose is to win the war against unsafe sanitation and poor hygiene. Everything we do proves we are unstoppable in the fight against germs, our brand essence. Our values and personality are guided by the Hero archetype: strong, uncompromising, unflinching - fighting battles others shy away from, such as the global sanitation crisis. James Bond would be proud. But this unstoppable brand ethos can be an uneasy marriage with the nuanced topic of sanitation. Nobody puts up with clumsy rhetoric. Unilever navigates a network of high-profile partners, so we needed to act sensitively, not criticising governments, panicking parents, or triggering ‘disgust’ showing dirty toilets.

BRIEF: Get policy-level stakeholders to realise that building toilets isn’t enough without O&M by engaging hearts and heads on the need for higher standards of school sanitation.

OBJECTIVE: Get people to realise that clean and safe school toilets are more valuable than they think.

Stop Toilet Loss because All Toilets Are Gold.

Most of us are lucky enough not to have to think about how valuable a clean and safe toilet is - because they’re well maintained. But this isn’t true for millions of children worldwide. Using the behavioural bias of “loss aversion” (a loss is more painful than a gain) we coined the phrase “Toilet Loss”. Then, to make the loss really matter, and because people take care of valuable things, we presented toilets not as mundane overlooked items; but in a way that embodies their real value to the world: as precious as gold. It takes a loss to truly appreciate something’s value. We created a bold icon – the gold toilet – that policymakers couldn’t ignore, and people wanted to share and show off, urging them all to Stop Toilet Loss - because All Toilets Are Gold.

Our starting point was that nobody cares. O&M is managed as a system, so our audience is complex and international: development banks, government ministries (finance, health, education), SDG data custodians, NGOs and in our key countries South Africa and the Philippines also citizens.

Exploiting the ‘loss aversion’ behavioural bias, we reframed O&M to show the value of keeping toilets clean and the loss when they’re not. Value and loss are invisible, so we made them tangible by showing (in gold) and quantifying (in numbers) a clean and safe school toilet helps children get sick less and go to school more.

We quantified the cost of not caring through an independent in-depth analysis by Economist Impact to prove ‘toilet loss’ is happening, at unimaginable scale. 1.2m toilets ‘lost’ in just 4 countries since 2015, amounting to US$1.9billion with additional economic and societal losses of US$10 billion. That’s a lot of gold.

We convened 80 partners and experts over 7 months through the editorial independence of Economist Impact to input, challenge our assumptions and align with our recommendation of no toilet built without a plan to maintain it.

We launched at gold-themed stakeholder debates in London, South Africa and the Philippines to mark World Toilet Day, raising the value of toilets in an unexpected way, convening representatives from SDG6 and SDG4, influencers, development banks and NGOs through the most unlikely of objects: a gold toilet. We activated employee volunteers to teach 6500 school children the value of a clean safe toilet and urged consumers and influencers to make their voices heard. Our gold toilet quickly became a new icon for the overlooked cause and 'Toilet Loss' a new economic modeling tool to spark investment, getting on the agenda at Africa and Asia Ministries meetings for the first time ever.

More attention for O&M than ever: globally 90m+ impressions, 3m citizens engaged, 80 stakeholders convened, 30+ PR articles, 21,400 visits to the ‘Tackling Toilet Loss’ report. In South Africa, Domestos increased sales volume during the campaign period, 1m children reached in 2023, increased private sector funding for the government-led programmes to reach 50% more schools in 2024. The Philippines government instantly adopted it as a decision-making tool: “Toilet Loss is a key piece of data we at the Department now use for planning and budget preparations to make universal access to sanitation for all school children a reality by 2030.” (Dr Dexter A.Galban, Department of Education, Philippines). And the concept was supported by SDG6 data custodians from WHO to UNICEF: ‘‘It’s very hard to get policymakers to care about school toilets. Toilet Loss is a powerful tool for attracting the investment needed to meet fast-approaching SDG targets” (Tom Slaymaker, UNICEF)