Brief Explanation

This paper shows how Lifebuoy, a health soap brand, successfully targeted United Nations (UN) policy makers with an emotional campaign about child mortality and neo-natal deaths in order to save the lives of children under 5. Every year two million children under five die from diarrhoea and pneumonia, 44% under the age of 28 days. Something easily preventable by the simple act of hand-washing with soap. Lifebuoy’s launched an innovative ‘Help a Child Reach 5’ movement - creating emotional cultural stories and social experiments to raise awareness about Under 5 deaths. Our Futurechild film featured an expectant rural mother in India talking about her hopes for her child receiving a testimonial from her 'future child' thanking her for the care she had taken during the crucial first few days of life. The campaign was presented at UN summits and to government representatives, launched online and broadcast in media dark regions in India by means of a ‘Travelling Cinema’. With media spend of just $3.5million, the campaign empowered millions of people worldwide to help every child reach the age of five, through a collective commitment to spread and share the Lifebuoy hand-washing cause. Thereby delivering against our 3 objectives: Attention: - We generated 54 million global YouTube views across our films, with share rates double benchmarks. - Futurechild was the 5th most watched YouTube video in India in 2015, with a PR reach of 890 million worldwide. Action. - We reduced disease and child deaths: Across the 3 years of our campaign India child mortality rates dropped by 214,000. Whilst we cannot directly attribute all of these lives saved, we can surmise that HACR5 was instrumental given the massive response to our campaign. - We garnered external Donor Support: By showcasing the success of Lifebuoy’s program globally to social investment funds and government aid agencies, Lifebuoy has won over $20 million of external funding from key donors to run its branded hand washing programs in key D&E geographies. - This enabled us to fund a Global Roll Out: Villages have been adopted across 14 countries with external partners recruited across Asia and Africa. Moreover, large scale programs are being deployed in 24 countries. Our initiative of teaching hand-washing extended to over 337 million people across the globe with India as the lead country. Advocacy: - Effective messaging, achieved urban groundswell and influenced the UN SDG goals. HACR5 saw the United Nations to include a hand-washing as indicator in Sustainable Development Goals 2030. This is significant as measuring it means it will actually be implemented The evolution of our strategy marks a new paradigm for a FMCG branded social good programme, now co-run with social and government organisations, which is a win-win-win for the public health sector, the private sector and the most vulnerable populations of the world. This new model is a breakthrough step in helping Lifebuoy reach 1 billion people with its hand washing behaviour change programme, which would be impossible for the brand or Unilever resources alone.