In Russia, orphans comprise 700,000 of its total population. Orphans are not exposed to the real world until they reach the legal age of adulthood. The lack of rudimentary skills often propels them into unemployment, homelessness, death. The international non-profit organization Big Brothers Big Sisters builds one-on-one relationships between orphans and volunteers. Volunteers spend time with children outside the orphanage and teach them how to live in the real world. The challenge of the campaign was to attract more volunteers to BBBS in Russia. We centred our campaign on the emotional rewards to each volunteer. The volunteers would teach the children, but at the same time they would in return be inevitably taught by the children to love, to wonder, to dream. Our unique insight: friendship with orphans makes us better people. We mounted an integrated campaign, which resulted in a sixfold increase in the influx of volunteers.

Our campaign was supported by CAF (Charities Aid Foundation). The first appearance was in March 2013 in outdoor, in march 2013 we launched print campaign. The opening of the first photo exhibition “The Friendship makes us better people” in the Central Park was confined to the Children's Day on 1st of June and another to beginning of the new school year in September. The next stage of the implementation was the exhibition in the airport in October and the winter event for volunteers and children in January. Campaign in print is continuing till today.

Additional tool we used for attracting volunteers was number of direct presentations (developed by our team) for representatives of the companies operating in Russia. We also put out multiple articles and conducted interviews with the Big Brothers Big Sisters participants, in order to inform and educate people about the programme through sharing real life stories.

We have found the absolutely clear insight for attracting newcomers to the programme and differentiate our campaign from most social campaigns which play on pang of gilt soliciting contributions. And we also defined the platform for the programme itself by bringing “friendship” into its positioning and transforming the mentorship into friendship giving volunteers the strong emotional reward.

We exceed clients’ expectations because our campaign resulted in sixfold increase in the influx of volunteers and it also had prolonged PR-effect raising awareness of the programme.

Our campaign was estimated as one of the best examples by international BBBS members and was taken as an idea for future implementation in some countries where BBBS operates.