#Blogladesh for Save the Children

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In July 2010 I was tasked with coming up with a digital / social media campaign that would create publicity for Save the Children in the lead up to and during the UN MDG summit in New York.

I’d been thinking a lot about how Save the Children could work effectively with bloggers, and in particular the parenting community. I began to listen, watch and learn, and at the end of July went to the first Cybermummy, a conference for mummy bloggers.

I met a group of passionate, funny, articulate women who, during the brilliant crowd sourced keynote speech, had the room falling around laughing and crying in equal measure.

Mums all over the world have the same hopes, fears and dreams for their children and I knew that Save the Children’s work would resonate with these women.

I’m a great believer in not re-inventing the wheel. There was no point in spending vast amounts of money building something and waiting for the masses to come (always a bit of a digital tumbleweed moment).  Any project had to use existing tools, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube etc – and we had to ‘go to’ the community.

I pulled together a plan and a few days later picked up the phone and invited three of the UK’s most high profile ‘mummy bloggers’, Sian To, Eva Keogan and Josie George,  to visit Save the Children’s work in Bangladesh.

The idea was that they’d meet mums and children just like them and share their stories and lives, minute by minute, with their online community back in the UK.

By inviting bloggers with large audiences we got immediate cut through with our target audience. We didn’t just take three mums with us to Bangladesh – we took the whole community.

The project, dubbed #Blogladesh, not only gave a voice to the healthcare workers and mums in Bangladesh that we met, we were also able to demonstrate the simple solutions that could put an end to the scandal of 8.1 million children dying every year from things like pneumonia and diarrhea.

Together we tweeted, uploaded films and photographs and blogged live from the paddy fields of Bangladesh.

And it caused a digital storm.

The project generated a 10 million reach on Twitter, thousands of hits in the blogosphere, 75 million reach in national media, two meetings with Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister and a commitment at the UN General Assembly.

63,569 people signed Save the Children’s ‘push for change’ petition.

I then took Sian To, one of the mummy bloggers,  to the UN summit in New York, September 2010. I filmed a daily video diary for ITN. The UN launched a worldwide campaign to save 16 million mothers and children over the next 5 years and Nick Clegg announced that the UK Government will double the number of women and children’s lives saved.

The campaign was supported on Twitter by Stephen Fry, Davina McCall, Nick Kirstoff, Richard Bacon, Neil Gaimon, Boy George, India Knight

The project was designed to push out into the mainstream media. Highlights include of media coverage include: Radio 4 Today programme, ITN lunchtime and Ten O’clock news, The Times, The Sun, The Express, Five Live, Sky online, AOL online, regional BBC radio.

It was first nominated as digital campaign of the week by PR Week – and then as one of their campaign moments of the year at the end of 2010. It has also been mentioned at TED X and shortlisted for a Media Guardian Digital Innovation award.

This project would not have been possible without the dedication of the three bloggers, their incredible community, the celebrities who supported the campaign, Save the Children Bangladesh,  and of course the talented team at Save the Children.

Last, but by no means least, the biggest thanks need to be reserved for the mums and children who graciously let us into their homes and shared their stories and their lives.