Lending a voice to UNICEF’s ‘Awaaz Do’

In the company of quarter intellectuals, I have sometimes professed that the solution , to all our country’s ills lies in ‘educating the girl child’. In that context, I was mightly pleased to come across UNICEF India’s ‘Awaaz Do’ campaign, which aims to speak up for every child’s right to education.

I was introduced to the campaign through this clever banner (speakers on, please) which interrupts your web surfing with a mild ‘knock on the door’ tap.

(Update: I tried embedding the flash banner here, but couldn’t get it to work.).

The site has a lot of content, offers easy naviagation and for once – an Indian campaign website has social media links which have decent content too! The Facebook & Twitter pages of the campaign are active and seem to have evoked a lot of conversation.

Campaigns like this are ideal for sharing among like-minded friends or as topics for bloggers. While the ‘Spread the Word’ section offers a lot of options (from SMS to email to writing a blog post), the campaign creators should have taken more care to make it more user-friendly. When you choose to ’email your circle’ the options offered – import from Gmail, Outlook etc. – leads to a pretty intimidiating window. That apart, the ‘Blogger’s Kit’ download does not work at all. Worse still, when you click the download posters link from here, it leads to some matrimonial site, whose URL clearly shows that its ‘out of CMS/awaazdo’ campaign.In the context of the serious nature of the campaign…a subject matter that would be close to so many people, such glitches kind of spoil the mood.

Most importantly, apart from registering for the program, the campaign lists specific things you can do, like visiting a school near you, checking if it has basic amenities and spreading the word among teachers & parents about RTE. The starting point for all this: the good old web banner. The ‘Awaaz Do’ campaign reiterated a few things:

– one can still beat the clutter in the ‘traditional’ space of digital creative, especially in paid media

– going beyond token presence on social media pages of the campaign really helps – it lends a vibrant, buoyant, active voice to the campaign itself

– provide all the tools you can for the ‘word to spread’; make it easy to use

– no matter how good the concept & creative, it all boils down to execution! Errors in execution take the sheen off a great idea.