Every year in Turkey, nearly 30.000 family farmers quit farming and leave for the city. As families leave their lands, food production has decreased in a dramatic rate. But Turkey where most of the population lives in urban areas wasn’t aware of the problem.

In the first part of the campaign, we showed the real farmers in our films. Films with the #pleasedontleave hashtag took over 1 million views and were supported with print, outdoor, radio spots. Also caught the attention of national media, social media and blogs... But there was one problem. Those farmers did not have any smartphones or twitter accounts to feel that support. So we came up with a solution: Tweet Village. We chose the most supportive tweets with the #pleasedontleave hashtag and turned 17 villages which had the highest rate of abandonment and transform them into Tweet Villages. With tweets from all over Turkey, we showed the farmers that Turkish people actually cared about them. With tweet village, maybe for the first time in the world, tweets were actually presented to their real owners. And as an answer of the final question, yes, we planned this from the beginning.

After we launched the films with #pleasedontleave hashtag, national and social media went crazy about it. Films with the #pleasedontleave hashtag took over 1 million views. The song we used in the films reached the number 1 spot on iTunes. And thousands of Turkish people showed their support to family farmers using the hashtag. 10.790 tweets were viewed more than 32.000.000 times and became a trending topic. And when we transformed 17 villages which had the highest rate of abandonment into Tweet Villages, we got the real result: Sekerbank gave Family Farming credit worth of more than 40 million TL, reached out thousands of family farmers who were encouraged to stay on their lands.