Since the main challenge was to get donations to help a cause, we needed an idea that makes the situation of current medical condition of underprivileged countries known to the developed world, while at the same time activate people to donate money for the cause. Why? It is hard to keep motivating people to give money while at the same time assuring them that their donations will reach the right place. For this we needed to activate people such that they emotionally get involved. Therefore we created a direct connection between donor and the portrayed person. With Portraid’s project IseeYousee 88 Portraits were photographed by a well know German photographer Thomas Rusch. As an activation we exhibited the Portraids at the Moroccan embassy in Berlin and online. The exhibition served as a splendid medium communicating a problem and activates people enough to buy the portraits, and in effect, donate money.

Portraid was implemented through its first project IseeYousee for the Abury foundation. The challenge for Portraid was to create a direct and personal connection from the donor to the person receiving the donation. This thought of “directness” was carried through the execution, including personal invitations to the exhibition in the Moroccan Embassy, a personal thank-you note to donors who purchased a Portraid, and a note to the person in the Portraid, who was curious to learn who his donor was; creating a direct link on both sides.

To generate momentum, we launched the website on the same day as the release of the March edition of The National Geographic, in which Portraid was featured as an 8 page detailed article. Both mediums highlighting the upcoming exhibition in the Moroccan Embassy and encouraged the viewer with a 90 seconds descriptive clip and a 14-minute documentary to purchase a Portraid.

With Portraid first project IseeYousee, we achieved a cross-media reach of nearly 130 million impressions, thereby making this problem a widely recognized issue. But what’s better and more direct a result than giving back the gift of sight to 88 Moroccan artisans who, otherwise, could have faced total blindness?

The portraits of these artisans were taken by famous German photographer Thomas Rusch were exhibited at the Moroccan embassy in Berlin.

The exhibition was an overwhelming success—all of the portraits were sold through multiple channels within days after the launch. The result of which is: The artisans featured in the portraits will now receive their free cataract operations in June. Portraid was also featured as a detailed article in the National Geographic which further drove curiosity to the website www.portraid.org and raised awareness of this new approach of helping people through the medium of photography.