There is enough food in the world to feed everyone, yet hunger is far from being defeated. Action Aid calls for more equal International food polices, promotes smallholder farmers’ rights to land and natural resources, and enhances sustainable agriculture.

The yearly “Operazione Fame” campaign takes advantage of the World Food Day risen attention on the hunger issue, in order to collect funds and enhance advocacy to help ActionAid reaching its objectives.

For World Food Day 2013 ActionAid Italia re-launched the “Operazione Fame” fundraising and awareness campaign with a new symbol and logo, with TV, print and radio ads, with a press conference and with PR activities targeting both influencers and final audience.

In order to reach the wider possible public with 0€ media budget but just PR pressure, the campaign needed to gain the more attention possible from influencers, journalists and TV anchor-men/women. And to do this “Operazione Fame” needed a new clear symbol, able to stand up among the huge amount of fundraising campaigns.

We created a a key symbol – a holed spoon – that helped explaining that to fight hunger we need the right tools: children and testimonials holding the holed spoon called for donations trough text messages. And TV/Radio shows, TV news as well as press articles, started talking about it. With amazing results.

Exploiting the buzz around the World Food Day, the holed spoon was launched when attention on the hunger issue was already raised, with a dedicated press conference on which journalist were invited to try and eat with the holed spoon.

The campaign was aiming to have people donating during one single week (when the collecting text message number was active) and all the efforts were made in order to have the spoon shown as much as possible in press articles, TV/radio shows, TV/radio news, social media, during that week.

With 0 euro spent for media buying, the holed spoon got almost 60 million people impacted by TV earned media in just 1 week and more than 150 articles in printed media, rising attention and sensibility on unequal distribution of food. ActionAid Italia facebook page reached 50,000 fans. But the most beautiful number of all was the number of messages received with donations: more than 70,000 SMS amounting to €154,000 donated by Italians to help ActionAid’s efforts to defeat hunger.