Awards

Christoph Nann, Alex Schill, Maik Kaehler and a team from Serviceplan in Germany will test a simple and modern method for generating donations to developing countries. They will use location-based network applications such as Foursquare, which has over 25 million users who record their locations in cafés, shops and restaurants. By setting up collaborations with local retail partners in Germany, they will label their stores on Foursquare with charity projects in developing countries, such as building water pumps, to promote visitors to the stores. Once an organization has been found that can handle the donations, they will launch the locations on a website. When a Foursquare user visits one of the project-labeled stores it will trigger an automatic donation of an agreed amount from the store to that project. The aim is to spread the approach to other cities.

Mark Bashore and his team from Digital Kitchen in the U.S. will create a worldwide radio channel for children aged 8 to provide knowledge, insights and perspectives on aid, and promote connections between the developing and the developed world. By focusing their approach on the young population, they hope in time to transform the "have and have not" concept of aid. The channel will broadcast aid-related first person stories, music, and cultural exchanges. Radio remains the dominant media in the developing world, and radios are cheap and durable. They will analyze possibilities for the manufacture and distribution of cheap radios, and develop and assess the feasibility of the proposal, and test it with children in the US, Europe, and developing countries.

Caroline Diehl of Media Trust in the United Kingdom and her team will combine its existing television channel with media partnerships and creative young people to produce the first television, online and mobile channel run by young people to disseminate stories on development. A pilot model has been locally tested using established infrastructure and partnerships. They will form global partnerships for distribution, recruit managers, and build a small team of young reporters and filmmakers from the UK and one or more developing countries, and provide them with a unique platform to create, present, and distribute stories on local and global development.

Eric King and colleagues from Leo Burnett in the U.S. will create a working stock ticker on the New York Stock Exchange that will track the daily performance of aid to publicize that investment in humankind (HMKD; i.e. aid) is working. They will work to list HMKD on the New York Stock Exchange and create a news site containing daily updates of activities, such as where new wells have been dug. They will also present data on the type and distribution of aid, and on the return, such as changes in literacy rates and disease control. By daily presenting aid in investment terms on a global stage, they hope to better highlight its success to a wider audience.

Tony Morain of Ogilvy in the U.S. will develop and launch an online platform for university student teams to campaign for their chosen development challenges. The platform will allow the teams to generate a "profile page" and develop a strategy for communicating success with the aid of proven communication tools and access to relevant resources, including case studies of effective communication strategies. Team voting will be used to select a winning campaign to support, which will be provided with funding. The aim is to empower young people with the ability to identify the major development challenges of their generation, and educate them to communicate the effectiveness of aid.

Charlotte Obidairo and team from Coxswain Social Investment plus (CSI+) of Tunisia will develop an open digital platform that uses crowdsourcing to solicit or offer solutions to development challenges from young people around the world. They will repurpose digital platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to present inspiring community-based success stories in multimedia format. In a pilot test, they will identify 10-15 authors from developing countries who will make short films of development challenges that they face, which will be outsourced to grade 7 students in 100 participating schools across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. They will evaluate the impact of the work to inform revisions and promote its expansion on a global scale.

Arjun Venkatraman of Environics Trust in India and colleagues will use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to collect 10,000 personal narratives of the impact of aid programs in rural India. The system will be developed to record a brief audio phone message from low-literate citizens who have benefited from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guarantees employment to any citizen who seeks it. They will train a team of moderators to solicit contributors, who will receive a nominal fee, and to review and cross-check contributions. Validated stories will be disseminated along with geographic location using the web and social media. The impact of this project on how young people perceive foreign aid will also be assessed. If successful, this approach could be broadened to other types of foreign aid programs and to other countries.

Chip Carter and colleagues of Plan International USA in the U.S. will evaluate a proven marketing model, the House Party, as a new distribution mechanism to enhance participation in international development causes. Supporters of child-focused international programs have been recruited in the U.S. to host house parties that use literature, short films, and other materials to directly engage and educate a broader network of long-term supporters. They will measure and document the effectiveness of this approach and its potential for replication at scale.

Jamie Lundine and a team from Spatial Collective in Kenya will promote communication between citizens, service providers, local government, and members of the international community, to help improve living conditions in developing countries. They will create an interactive community platform accessible via SMS for citizens to present local development challenges, such as water supply shortages, and suggest possible solutions. Service providers and potential donors can then use the multi-media platform to identify these needs, and develop and evaluate solutions. The platform will be pilot tested in Nairobi, Kenya.

Daniel Shaw and a team at Wieden+Kennedy New York in the U.S. will develop a digital platform that collects real-time data from devices that measure human activity as it relates to aid - for example the number of times a clean water pump is used or how many vaccine needles are used in an immunization campaign. The project will field-test sensor devices for their ability to track physical action, and a platform will be built to integrate the field data with content that tells the stories of foreign aid progress.