Best Social Cause Case Study


The digitally driven crowdfunding campaign leveraged celebrities, influencers and cancer cure stakeholders to successfully raise Rs. 1CR emergency fund with a virtually zero marketing budget.

Child cancer is a dreaded disease but what’s even more dreadful is the statistics around it. Despite the best medical facilities available in India, the survival rate is as low as 30%, compared to 80% in developed countries. Abandonment rates due to financial and emotional burden amongst low income families is as high as 40%. And 90% of these abandonments happen in the first month of treatment.

To build an Emergency Fund, 1SmallStep Foundation and Gozoop embarked on a 6-week-long crowdfunding campaign called ‘#1SmallStepforCancer’. The digitally driven campaign leveraged celebrities, influencers and cancer cure stakeholders to successfully raise Rs. 1 crore to help 1,000 children survive cancer. Interestingly, ‘#1SmallStepforCancer’ was executed with a virtually zero marketing budget!

The campaign adopted an integrated approach with a three-pronged marketing objective – a) Raise awareness, b) Spread the message, and c) Inspire tangible action. The main mediums of communication were social platforms, content publications, website and email marketing. The first step was celebrity selection. Celebrities who are known for their philanthropic side, or have had personal experiences with “the big C” were chosen as ambassadors, namely: Emraan Hashmi, Johnny Lever, Varun Dhavan and Shilpa Shetty Kundra. Also, their fan base on social media would ensure a larger reach organically.

Additionally, a website was built serving as the hub of the campaign where all potential contributors would learn about the cause and where they could donate. The user interface was designed to ease the user experience for potential donors, while considering load times were kept in check. Along with the primary social media channels, Whatsapp was also integrated to encourage social sharing and awareness.

The campaign also partnered with Milaap, one of India’s eminent crowd donation portals with a ready contributor base. The team not only reached out to donors from Milaap’s database through email, it also engaged the ones that donated, keeping them abreast of the progress to inspire them to leverage their own personal network.

#1SmallStepForCancer with its interesting marketing mix of social media, influencer marketing, direct emails, digital PR, analytics and online crowdfunding tools, goes on to prove that campaigns with nearly zero marketing budgets, specially social cause ones, can also rake in the desired results, if only it is planned and executed accordingly.

The campaign turns a Google search for the Blue Whale Challenge and its associated terms to a search for mental health difficulties in children, instead. This undercover search campaign has been active since November 2017, attempting to divert traffic from all ‘Blue Whale Challenge’ related searches, to relevant topics around mental health.

Late 2017, the Blue Whale phenomenon had quickly become a media sensation and misinformation about it was everywhere. And even by the time the challenge faded, few were aware that the challenge’s virality was linked to poor mental health in children. India’s adults were still contributing to 57% of the overall search volumes for all ‘Blue Whale Challenge’ keywords on Google, searching for it about 1.4 million times per month and because its news was so sensationalized, page 1 of search results barely showed content about its links to mental health.

The ads led users to a landing page which introduced them to these mental health stressors which the Blue Whale Challenge could have been feeding off of, along with another ‘Google Search’ for each of those conditions... built into it as a CTA (Call to Action), thus, turning every Google search around ‘Blue Whale’ to a search about mental health instead.

Considering these were complex mental stressors (Anxiety in Children, Depersonalization, Social Engineering and Bullying), they hadn’t organically received a high volume of queries, despite having several credible results. The ads have received an 8% CTR (Click Through Rates)- almost triple of the Google average. And Google’s data shows searches for 6 out of 7 mental health related keywords have gone up at least by 15 percent and up to 100 percent.

Anushma Kshetrapal, founder, Color of Grey Cells, says “Project Re-search uses the Blue Whale Challenge as a wake-up call and aims to direct an adult’s invested concern in it towards some of the oft ignored mental health difficulties that could have made our children vulnerable to it. The hope is that adults ‘re-searching’ through this initiative take their first step towards learning about issues we’ve ignored as a society for far too long”.

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