Do it Day: How the world was changed by Mashable, Bozza, Unilever, Trinity Mirror, Barclays, United Nations, Dennis Publishing & more

BeWorthwhile is a non-profit organisation that matches charities with people based on skills, available time and location – all you need to do is enter your details and the practical skills you can offer on the website.

Ben Maher, Mashable executive director EMEA, opted to bring back two of the teams from Plan It Day to work on the challenge – and one of their first decisions was to change the boss’s plans.

“I’d registered the domain name timebank.org but someone came up with a better one, beworthwhile, and we changed it there and then,” Maher explained. “It’s a better name. It fits. It doesn’t need explaining. That has enabled us to position it well. And it will enable us to articulate through the written, and spoken word, exactly what we’re doing.”

From there, the team got their teeth into coding (with some help from hosts IBM), logo design, brand guidelines and clearly defining the position.

“Now I’m looking at what needs to happen after today so that today doesn’t become a case of, ‘oh great, we had a nice day out of the office and did something’. It’s going to be how do we take this on to the next level.

“This is an idea that I’ve had and Do It Day has given me the impetus to do it. I’ve invented a million things, and I’ve never built one of them. The important thing about this is this is about doing it.”

The Metro/Asda

Metro, in association with Asda, accentuated the positive on Do It Day celebrating the little acts of kindness that often go unnoticed.

Tasked with amplifying the Metro's Good Deed Feed the original plan was to work together with Asda to 'unlock the power of karma' and create a sense of pride within local communities. However, logistical issues meant adapting the plan and merging the winning idea with another very strong Plan It Day contender.

"We loved both ideas," said Sophie Robinson, Metro creative director, "we've kept the element of competition between the communities but moved it from in-store to online which has required a lot of work to be done before today."

Sparking people's interest, the Metro team placed local ads in each region on Do It Day, asking readers to tweet good deeds they'd done or experienced with the kindest region to be announced the following day. The best good deed from each region was also rewarded with a £50 Asda voucher.

In addition to the social push, Metro recorded a radio ad live at Do It Day turning it around in a mere matter of hours to broadcast during drive time further encouraging each region to get involved.

"Most days we get around 20 Good Deed tweets, we've had over 100 and it's not even noon yet, said Robinson.

Whilst Barbara Feeney, head of trade marketing at Metro, added: "It's already a really positive, popular feature but hopefully after today more readers will get involved, it [Do It Day] has really shown how quickly our team can turn things around. Today's tweeted will be in tomorrow's paper and our production team are on standby to finish the ad for the winning region tonight."

In the end, the south east won across the UK as the kindest region.

Trinity Mirror

Trinity Mirror aimed to meet their challenge of normalising death by hosting a Death Cafe within IBM London’s offices during Do it Day which meant creatives strategising how the general public could be brought to perceive the issue.

They talked discussed the most effective route to raise awareness of how to persuade more people to create a will in order to lessen the burden on those they leave behind. This included creating some print adverts and discussed creating editorial content for the Daily Mirror.

Shock advertising was chosen as the most effective route to engage with the public, but with a humorous touch.

On the campaign, Zoe Harris, group marketing director for Trinity Mirror, said: “We represent Britain’s modern mass market and feel we have a responsibility to educate on and stand for the things that will improve their lives - we wanted to get people to talk openly about one of life’s biggest taboos, death, by challenging the issue head-on.

IBM

IBM spent Do it Day building a platform to make teens “fall back in love” with science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects.

Based on the insight that youths today don’t have the skills or confidence in Stem to translate their ideas into a reality, the tech giant spent Do it Day creating a website where young people could submit their ideas and watch them come to life.

The team identified areas that millennials were already passionate about, including fashion, gaming, music and sport, and tapped into these interests by putting them into the context of Stem.

Splitting into to groups - creatives and tech - the team spent the day producing a working demo of the site, dubbed Stitch.d, which will allow teens to share wearable design prototypes.

Entrants are able to submit any invention, be it a handbag that vibrates when your keys are missing or a pair of gloves with an in-built gaming controller, and the products deemed the most feasible will be put forward to a public voting round on Crowdfunder (which IBM partnered with on the project).

The final five are set to be showcased at London’s Wearable Technology Show in 2016 where a final winner will be selected by a panel of brand judges.

“IBM are particularly aware of the shortage of graduates in this area,” said Bill Sullivan IBM’s Interactive Experience European marketing lead.

“We wanted to spend the day creating a buzz about the excitement that can come from great ideas in this space,” he added.

Unilever

Unilever wants to connect young female entrepreneurs in Brazil with mentors in their areas of interest and expertise.

It is doing this through a concept it calls 'belo cerebro', or beautiful brains.

This concept was based on the findings that 95% of women in Brazil would change their bodies if they could. Unilever wants to refocus the spotlight on the beauty of women's brains rather than the beauty of their bodies.

To do this the team at Do It Day created an app where users can find their beautiful brain type by using IBM Watson technology and entering their social media details or by doing a quiz.

Once users have had their brain type identified they will be linked to mentors in their areas who are similarly minded or who have started businesses where those skills could be required.

There are also mentor and member profiles and the content strategy on the accompanying website lets users link to mentor blogs and videos providing a constant source of information and encouragement.

Dixon's Carphone/Visa

Dixon's Carphone aimed to develop a new platform which would connect educators across different schools and allow them to support one another when using technology in the classroom.

This led to the creation of My Satchel, a prototype platform which, with the help of pupils, would allow content to developed and tested in order to help share knowledge and improve lesson planning.

Crossing over with Visa's challenge of improving Children's awareness of money, the site also had a Money File which would allow them to answer multiple choice questions around money, in line with the national curriculum.

The development of this platform included creating Twitter, Pintrest, YouTube and Vimeo accounts to allow sharing

Bozza

Bozza wanted to build interest and excitement around African artists, changing perceptions along the way, was embraced with by teams at The Drum's Plan it Day in September, with ideas ranging from the production of an African musician’s cover of an iconically British song, to the delivery of an African inspired dance flash mob.

But one idea in particular stood out. The winning team drew on the central idea of celebrating what the continent has to offer by holding a crowdfunded one day festival – #thedrumnation – in the UK for emerging African artists. Taking place in May 2016, the festival would emphasise Africa’s music, poetry and heart.

The ambitious strategy was centered around crowdfunding creativity through both brands and individuals, engaging influential individuals like Reggie Yates, Emma Watson, Douglas Booth and Cara Delevigne – with an estimated reach of 23 million followers. The aim is to raise £100k to accommodate 10 African artists.

With an advert in The Metro at the start of Do It Day and an online video calling for donations as people were asked to get involved in an nine drumming challenge, the campaign made just over £6,000 by the end of Do it Day itself, with over three weeks still to run.

HELP (Haitian Education & Leadership Program)

To raise money for scholarships in Haiti, charity HELP (Haitian Education & Leadership Program) created a BuzzFeed quiz that at the end asks people to donate $1 or more in order to meet the organization’s goal of sending 25 additional students to college next year.

Called ‘Are You Smarter Than A Haitian High School Student?’, the online quiz asks people to answer five questions that are similar to the problems Haitian students are required to solve on their college entrance exam.

If you fail the quiz, the following message appears: “Sorry, you are not going to college in Haiti. Unfortunately, neither are 15,000 other students who passed an exam roughly 15,000 times harder than this quiz. Sad, right? You can donate and HELP change these statistics. At $15 for a year’s tuition, literally every dollar counts.”

Those who manage to pass the test are encouraged to donate when they are told that they are one of almost 18,000 students eligible to attend college in Haiti – but unfortunately, more than 15,000 of these students don’t have the $15 to afford tuition even if they are smart enough to go.

In Haiti, college attendance and graduation rates are extremely low. University enrollment is at 1 per cent - among the lowest in the world. HELP aims to change this with its scholarships that provide classes at accredited Haitian universities, textbooks, housing, and more. According to HELP, it is currently supporting 170 students for the 2015-2016 school year but wants to bump that number up moving forward.

Dennis Publishing

Dennis Publishing's aim to plant 10,000 Trees working with the Heart of England Forrest included the creation of a cinema advertising campaign activated through the #treesfortrees social campaign devised during Planning Day.

The campaign would see a tree planted for every drawing of a tree sent through social media to promote the activity.

The target was met during Do it Day, with Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow among those to help plant trees on the day.

One Minute Briefs also supported the social media drive t get Britain drawing trees as did Turner prize winning artist Martin Creed.

Ad Council & US Forest Service

Although using technology to try and get kids away from their screens and into nature might seem like an unorthodox idea, the Ad Council and Forest Service tasked their Do It Day partners with leveraging a tech platform to encourage children to play outside.

The result is an in-game promotion on Minecraft that prompts players to go outdoors and “mine” things like dirt, water, and stones in order to “unlock” features in the game – like a forest ranger skin or something else that can only be accessed to those who participate. Players who post photos on social media of what they have mined outside along with a campaign hashtag will be sent a link where they can download the Minecraft features they’ve unlocked.

“Overall we’re in a really good place,” said Conor Toomey, assistant campaign manager at the Ad Council. He added that in terms of promoting the social media driven campaign, one of the challenges will be reaching kids’ parents as well as the kids themselves since many children in the age range they are targeting don’t use platforms like Facebook.

“I think if we promote it well enough, parents will see that this has the potential to make their kids really interested,” he said.

By the end of Do It Day, the creative team working on the brief had already created a number of social media assets for the campaign that will run on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as well as some of the customized skins that will be available to players.

The United Nations

Bringing home the scale sense of loss, USA for UNHCR uses Do It Day help Americans see how the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Middle East & Europe is affecting people just like them.

As winter draws in the severity of the ongoing humanitarian crisis - spurred by conflict in the Middle East and surrounding region - becomes apparent as millions of people fleeing persecution land on European shores seeking a reprieve from suffering, and in some cases a new start.

This debate has dominated the national discussion in European nations for the majority of 2015, but the world’s most economically powerful nation the USA has yet to broach the matter on a similar scale.

This can be attributed to the world’s most economically powerful nation being buffered to the scale and severity of the problem by the Atlantic Ocean, but USA for UNHCR will use the ideas cultivated on Do It Day to bring the issue to life in living rooms across America.

The NGO used the Plan It Day, and Do It Day series of events to devise concepts to approach some of the internet’s biggest names with storytelling methods that can help humanise the issue to Americans.

It now intends to approach prospective partners from the digital media sector to help bring the human story of the refugee crisis home to the tens of millions of US citizens that have yet to engage with help bring resolution to the issue.

Ideas discussed approaching Facebook and asking them if it is possible to limit the use of their services in an attempt to bring home to rank and file Americans the sense of loss experienced by those unhoused in the ongoing crisis.

The theory came from the fact that most Americans use Facebook and Google every single day means that such companies are no longer a luxury, and literally just a basic right. Access to Wi-Fi is up there with food and shelter now.

Included in the campaign activity was a digital billboard advert that ran in Times Square, provided by Clear Channel, and was created by The Drum's editor at Large, Dave Birss which drew parallels between the number of people walking through the famous New York landmark each day and the number of refugees.

Find out more about what happened during Do it Day from the dedicated Live Blog.

Barclays

The Barclays team went into Do it Day with the aim of helping young unemployed people find jobs using its LifeSkills CV builder.

The challenge was "Jobs for Christmas, Skills for life" and aimed to help 10,000 unemployed 18-24 year-olds find work by guiding them through the process of creating a CV. The idea was based on the fact that young people often find it easier to identify skills and qualities in others than they do themselves.

Barclays created a social campaign strategy around this concept by encouraging young people to highlight the qualities in their friends by writing them down and sharing a photo of it using the hashtag #YourLifeSkills.

Careers advisor Sandra Rhule was on the creative team undertaking the Do it Day challenge and said one of the most challenging aspects of her job was getting "young people to identify their own skills". She added that "they're actually able to identify other peoples skills better than their own."

Barclays communications manager, Rebecca Poch, said that that the brand's CV builder tool has shown that "peer to peer feedback is the greatest motivation among young people".

The LifeSkills CV builder will aim to give job seekers a structure and content for their CV by using social media mining to identify relevant skills which can be put into the CV.