The Brief

Akanksha, an NGO in Mumbai provides free education to underprivileged kids. They were facing a shortage of volunteers to teach, because most people feel they are not ‘qualified’ enough to teach these kids.  Our initiative aimed to break this mindset by giving people a first-hand experience of the simple joy of teaching. The target audience was the people of Mumbai - from college students to office executives to house wives.

Creative Execution

For an NGO like Akanksha, mass media communication wasn't an option – but the more people they would reach out to, the better their chances of getting volunteers. So as always the idea had to be buzz worthy to get Mumbai talking.  The surprise of seeing classrooms at public places, especially on Teacher's Day, made the message relevant.   

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Armed with a few benches and blackboards, hundreds of kids from Akanksha set up classrooms at airports, malls, promenades and other public places across Mumbai. A simple message on the blackboard "Will you be our teacher?" invited passers-by to step forward and teach these kids. We believed that the experience of teaching these kids would convince people that they could indeed teach them more often. 

Results

MTV and Big FM, a popular radio station joined in too. Minister of State for HR, Shashi Tharoor also tweeted about the activity to millions of his followers.  We received free media coverage worth USD 1,00,000. The activity was virtually free as everything used to conduct the activity - chairs, benches, blackboards and school buses were the property of Akanksha itself.   217 teacher & 385 volunteers applications were received -  roughly 4 times the target. NGOs across the country and even in Pakistan are conducting the same activity in their respective cities.