PROJECT FREE PERIOD

Short List
TitlePROJECT FREE PERIOD
BrandSTAYFREE
Product / ServiceSANITARY NAPKINS
CategoryB01. Brand-led Education & Awareness
EntrantDDB MUDRA Mumbai, INDIA
Idea Creation DDB MUDRA Mumbai, INDIA
PR DDB MUDRA Mumbai, INDIA
Production DDB MUDRA Mumbai, INDIA
Additional Company PRERANA ANTI-TRAFFICKING Mumbai, INDIA

Credits

Name Company Position
Rahul Mathew DDB Mudra Group National Creative Director
Brijesh Jacob 22Feet Tribal Worldwide Pvt. Ltd. Chief Creative Technologist
Shagun Seda DDB Mudra Group Executive Creative Director
Kapil Tammal DDB Mudra Group Executive Creative Director
Sharad Das Gupta DDB Mudra Group Senior Art Director & Copywriter
Aashna Gopalkrishnan DDB Mudra Group Copywriter
Vinay Singh DDB Mudra Group Group Head
Lalit Sakurkar DDB Mudra Group Group Head
Faraaz Ansari DDB Mudra Group Art Director
Aditya Kanthy DDB Mudra Group Group Managing Director
Kim Das DDB Worldwide Global Business Director
Toru Jhaveri DDB Mudra Group Senior Strategy Director
Sanchari Chakrabarty DDB Mudra Group Senior Strategist
Natasha Bohra DDB Mudra Group Strategist
Anushka Gilani DDB Mudra Group Strategist
Rajiv Sabnis DDB Mudra Group Executive Director
Nikita Tambay DDB Mudra Group Associate Vice President - Brand Experience & Engagement
Vinisha P DDB Mudra Group Associate Vice President - Brand Engagement
Megha Jaiswal DDB Mudra Group Manager - Brand Solutions
Megha Sharma DDB Mudra Group Manager Brand Solutions
Sayali Kolge DDB Mudra Group Manager Brand Solutions
Qaid Vora DDB Mudra Group Executive Brand Solutions
Vishal Sane DDB Mudra Group Films Head
Chandana Bannikoppa DDB Mudra Group Films
Ganesh Pawal DDB Mudra Group Films
Himmat Singh Shekhawat Shekhawat Filmography DOP
Akanksha Mishra DDB Mudra Group Manager - Corporate Communications & PR
DarshaniJawale DDB Mudra Group Executive - Corporate Communication & PR
Kashif Memon Mothership Productions Production
Paromita Balodi Mothership Productions Editor

The Campaign

Unlike most women, commercial sex workers actually look forward to their periods. Because it’s the only time they cannot be forced to work. Introducing Project Free Period. An initiative that turned their 3 days of periods, or 3 days of no work, into 3 days of learning. We partnered with professional trainers and Prerana, an anti-trafficking NGO, to create a unique curriculum. It comprises of skills that can create economic sustenance, and are compressed into 3-day modules. So that they can use their period days to skill themselves in another trade. Project Free Period takes the most natural and biological occurrence in a woman's life... her periods and changes it into the most basic of human rights... self respect.

Creative Execution

The curriculum is made up of 8 skills that run these around the month, every month. To help scale up our ability to train, on International Women’s Day, we put out a social media campaign to recruit volunteer trainers. We also got popular influencers like Olympic medalist, P.V. Sindhu and Instagram celebrity Priya Malik to talk about the initiative. To introduce the world to our students and to introduce our students to a new source of income, we run exhibitions of our products at various locations and also through our partnership with India's largest retail chain, Big Bazaar. With the support of Ujjivan, India's largest micro-finance company, we also run financial literacy classes for our students. With colleges offering to manage the project, banks offering to run financial management classes, and more brands extending their support, Project Free Period is now India's largest volunteering program built through a public-private partnership.

Over 210 days of training. Zero dropouts with every student finishing at least one skill. About 15000 days of periods turned into 15000 days of learning. Volunteers enrolled through online campaign - 67384 from across 17 states. Retail Partnership with Big Bazaar. Financial partnership with Ujjivan. Potential income generated (as per value attached to services and profits from exhibitions) - over 4.5 million indian rupees. 40% increase in Brand Equity Total reach - 1.7 billion

A CSR initiative by Stayfree, India's leading sanitary-protection brand, Project Free Period is aimed at women from the sex trade. The initiative teaches them a new trade on their period days; since they cannot be forced to work on those days. While combining two topics hitherto shrouded in silence, menstruation and prostitution; it shifts the narrative from taboo to empowerment. To further involve the society in this conversation, we also conducted online recruitment drives for volunteers. And have recruited over 60000 people to participate in not just the conversation, but in the initiative as well.

As a brand, Stayfree stands for normalising periods in the lives of women. Here, we saw an opportunity to use periods to normalise the lives of commercial sex workers. Through studies of market economics, we narrowed down skills that could generate sustainable incomes for these women in the future. We worked with professional trainers and NGO Prerana to compress these skills into 3-day modules that were easy to learn. The curriculum also allowed them to advance their skill with every module. To be able to scale up the positive response from our early workshops, we ran a nationwide recruitment drive for volunteer trainers. Through Unicef backing, volunteering for ProjectFreePeriod is now part of the social curriculum of leading colleges. This earned a lot of media for the initiative and a lot of love for the brand. This also helped us refresh our curriculum with new skills, thereby attracting new students.

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