The situation: while most people enjoy a comfortable lifestyle in our country, there are many lower-income families who struggle and find themselves trapped in unfortunate circumstances that can be difficult to escape.

Every year our company launches an Annual Corporate Ramadan Donation Campaign to give back to our community and those in need. We work with different charity organizations to identify poignant social causes and try to be part of the solution. These causes are then categorized under three buckets: Social, Medical and Educational.

The brief was to design the Annual Corporate Donation Ramadan Campaign to raise funds for the different causes to benefit as many people as possible. This means coming up with fresh approaches and novel campaign ideas.

The idea was to create something that looked nothing like a regular fund-raising campaign. Based on the insight that people are tired of annual appeals that feature emotional photography of people’s unfortunate circumstances, we featured no people at all.

Instead, we showcased seemingly ordinary objects juxtaposed with unexpected headlines that redefined what these objects meant to those who need them. In this way, we would draw people in, create empathy, make them understand what their donation could actually do, and inspire them to take action.

Reviewing past campaigns that have launched for this initiative, we found a trend in which the company leaned heavily on featuring people to create sympathy. An internal focus group found people have become increasingly skeptical and lacked connection with the advertisements. We wanted to challenge this well-trodden path. Our strategy was to steer away from expected images and headlines. Rather than telling a negative story, we turned the narrative around and took a positive, hopeful approach that is more in keeping with our company’s brand and ethos. We created an upbeat message with a powerful call to action “Donate now. You donate. We match. Our Impact Multiplies,” encouraging people to donate to this campaign in particular because the company will match the employee donations.

A total of six executions were designed each targeting a cause under the three buckets (medical, social, educational). The executions were adapted to specific formats that would target our employees through different avenues, namely, mass e-mails, sms messages, web banners, company newspapers (both digital and print), through our corporate app (which has over 30,000 active users) and on digital screens all over the company. The campaign launched on the first day of Ramadan and ran for six weeks.

This fresh approach managed to capture people’s attention and received praise and positive feedback from employees and management who commended this unusual approach that proved you don’t have to feature people to touch people’s hearts. The results also speak for themselves as we managed to raise over one million dollars. This was doubled by the company, multiplying the result and the good we in our community.