The Ramadan Scratch & Smile Cards

Shortlist at the MENA Cristals 2016 / Direct Mailing

The Brief
Every three minutes across the world, a child is born with a cleft condition, some fatal. Operation Smile (an NGO) has always dedicated itself to the cause of raising funds towards their treatment. This Ramadan, the agency on behalf of Dubai Festival City, partnered with Operation Smile with the objective of getting its corporate clients to donate towards this noble cause.

Creative Execution
We simply reversed the entire process of a Scratch & Win Card with a ‘Scratch & Smile Card’! Instead of winning a prize upon spending, we got our clients to give: by playing the role of a benefactor. The interactive scratch card mechanism helped us demonstrate how they had the power to ‘unlock’ the smile of a child born with a cleft condition with just a dirham and be the enablers of positive change.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.
Our insight: in this part of the world the concept of a Scratch & Win Card is big: where you spend to win something in return. We simply turned this ‘material’ act into a ‘social’ one. We created special Ramadan greeting cards distributed to our clients that showed children with a scratch card foil covering their mouth. When scratched (with a coin, as is usually done in this part of the world), the child’s smile was revealed, reinforcing the simple truth that all you need is a dirham to make a child smile again.

Results
Out of nearly 400 cards sent out to our select corporate clients, donations collected were nearly AED 30,000 during the Ramadan month. At AED 880 being the cost for a single operation, it enabled us to put a smile back on the faces of 35 children = that’s one smiling child every day over 1 month!