Casa Caleb is a non-profit nursing home that takes care of elderly people who have been found alone in the streets and with health problems. The home survives on donations, but they are very hard to come by, making it difficult to give them the quality of life they deserve.

Our challenge: Find a way to increase donations in a regular way, having sustainable income. Real Characters is a project that allows elderly people to leave a legacy behind and at the same time, obtain sustainable income for Casa Caleb; turning their handwriting into typefaces named after them and available for everyone at www.realcharcters.org for just $2.00.

The PR strategy was to raise awareness through the story concentrating on three major targets: Designers, advertisers and everyone with the means to help. We launched the website in partnership with Publinews, one of the newspapers with more circulation in Guatemala. They printed an especial edition with the elderly people’s typographies in all their headlines. A video was made with this incredible story so it could be shared in different websites and design blogs. Today brands like Pepsi, Bayer, Coors, Kimberly Clark and even the Guatemalan Government are using these fonts in their ads. The story was so moving, it crossed borders to other countries like Honduras and Costa Rica, who shared it on different media. We inspired media reaching 1M dollars in free media and $500,000 in free press. In just one month we had 23,000 downloads in over a hundred countries, making the names of these characters known and saved on thousands of computers all over the world.

The Real Characters Project was launched in partnership with Publinews, one of the most important newspapers in the country, with a special edition in which all the headlines were printed with the fonts made from the elders’ handwriting. Members of our team were interviewed by local TV channels.

Our story was shared on social networks by:

· Adobe Latin America.

· Getty Images Latin America.

· Hand Made Fonts

· Glyphs Font Software

· Splenda

· Pepsi

· Fonts In Use

· Matutino Express (Canal Antigua, local TV Channel)

Advertisers that are currently using Real Characters fonts:

· Guatemalan government

· Coors

· CBC

· Pepsi

· Bayer

· Kimberly-Clark

23,000 downloads from more than 100 countries around the world in just one month.

All the TV channels in Guatemala covered the initiative.

More than 5,000,000 views, shares and posts in social media in one month.