Teach India

Background

India has over 300 universities and 15,600 colleges turning out 2.5 million graduates a year. In terms of volume production, the country trails behind only the USA and China. Yet this large mass of highly educated Indians co-exists with a large mass of illiterates.

The National Literacy Mission was launched in the 1990’s, exhorting educated Indians to give back to society and while it struck the right emotional note, it led to little direct action.

Many middle-class Indians have emerged from challenging backgrounds themselves and are sensitive to the plight of those they may have left behind.

The question was, how could this fantastic resource be used for the good of all?

Idea

The Times of India, the country’s largest daily newspaper, had had great success with its Lead India campaign in 2007 and wanted to maintain the momentum of consensus. They wanted to channel the emotional energy of millions of citizens into real platforms.

On July 6th, they replaced the editorial of the front page with a message about The Class of 2008.

No fewer than 28 direct response ads, 10 outdoor executions and 3 commercials pushed people to a website where they could register, pledging to give up just two hours a week to teach.

The campaign played to a sense of social responsibility, which, for nearly three thousand years, has been part of the canonical teaching of all four of India’s main faiths, Vedic Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.

Once the database of volunteers was established, the idea was to introduce them to the NGO’s that could most benefit from their skills.

Results

One of the NGO partners hoped that as many as 2,000 volunteers might sign up to teach two hours a week. The campaign was closed when 100,000 had committed. 55,000 of these trained to become teachers with nearly 100 NGOs eager for their help.

32 schools donated space for classes as did 31 corporations. And so far, there have been around 2 million students. But this is a campaign that has only just begun.

Our Thoughts

The Times of India is building a platform for itself around a ‘let’s do it’ sort of attitude. Rather than talk about papers or even news it talks about issues that concern all Indians. The result is a groundswell of support for what are projects in social engineering. While JWT carefully avoid mentioning the numbers of additional newspapers sold, my bet is that these crusading campaigns have had a very positive effect on the bottom line. Brands communicate more about themselves in what they do than in what they say. Most banks say they care but every day provide us with evidence to the contrary. The Times of India, by contrast, does not say it cares but provides evidence that it does. I expect this campaign to win many serious awards in the year ahead.