Objective: Educate, inspire, and move Americans to respond to the challenges facing children affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. Generate a 6-percent rate of sponsorship.
Strategy: Replicate the emotional response generated by a one-to-one interaction with an African child affected by the pandemic.
Tactics: Create an interactive, modular exhibit that transports attendees into the heart of an African village and allows them to experience the story of a real-life child whose family has been devastated by AIDS. Partner with churches for staffing, promotion, and community awareness.
Results: More than 161,000 people have toured the experience, which has achieved an 11-percent sponsorship rate, valued at more than $11 million, and another $3 million in associated media coverage.
he facts are well publicized. The statistics, staggering. But despite the endless feed of news stories and graphic images decrying the dire circumstances associated with the AIDS crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa (a region that is home to more than two-thirds of all people on the planet living with HIV/AIDS), this catastrophic milieu of human suffering often fails to capture Americans’ attention, let alone motivate them to get involved.
In fact, the catalyst often required to spur would-be donors to action is the experience of going to Africa and seeing the devastation firsthand, says Michael Yoder, director of experiential engagement at World Vision, a Federal Way, WA-based Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to tackling poverty, injustice, and disease worldwide. “One-hundred percent of the time, when someone sees the crisis firsthand and meets the people who are in need and whom we are trying to help, it’s an undeniable, life-changing experience,” Yoder says. “If we could send every potential donor to Africa, we’d have an army of people committed for life to our organization and its cause.”
Sending donors to Africa, however, is the last thing World Vision wants to do. “Spending thousands of dollars to fund an expensive humanitarian trip to Africa is counterproductive when that same money could transform not only a single child’s life, but an entire village,” Yoder explains. Yet historically, traditional marketing channels leveraged by World Vision have failed to replicate the immediacy of a first-person experience.
“We’ve used the Internet since the mid-90s. We’ve done radio-thons. And like other charities, we’ve used direct mail forever,” Yoder says. “We were also a pioneer in the nonprofit sector when we began launching TV specials in the 1970s.” In recent years, however, TV in particular has generated diminishing returns due to dissipating viewership levels, he says. “It’s becoming more and more difficult to find the right audience.”
World Vision even employed a brand-ambassador approach to fundraising earlier in the decade, when it partnered with another faith-based organization that plans conferences aimed at training youth workers. The two organizations used these events as a platform to equip the workers with the tools they would need to spread the word about the AIDS pandemic. “We developed videos and print materials designed to bring the crisis alive in a way that an adult youth leader could relate to and present to others,” Yoder says. But the results of that effort did not live up to expectations. “We could tell them why the crisis was important and why they needed to tell others about how important it was, but the facts and figures weren’t enough,” he says. “They still didn’t feel and understand — in a fundamentally personal way — what the impact of the crisis was like and how it was affecting young people in Africa.”
A FARAWAY CRISIS MADE REAL
It was at that point that Yoder’s team realized it couldn’t simply show people a video or make a speech and tell them what they should feel. “We had to find a different way to break through and make this real for people,” he says. “We knew we couldn’t take them to the crisis, so we tried to think of ways that we could stimulate the same kind of automatic understanding, heart change, and level of commitment that always results from people experiencing this sort of humanitarian disaster up close.”
World Vision’s answer came during a 2005 brainstorming session. At the meeting, marketing team members began discussing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, where visitors receive the ID card of a real individual who lived during the Holocaust era and listen to audio telling that person’s life story as they walk through various scenes and vignettes. “At the end of your journey, you find out whether he or she survived the Holocaust,” Yoder explains. “As we talked about how impactful that experience was, that’s when it clicked for us. We immediately knew that we needed to replicate that kind of personal journey if we were going to show people what it is really like to be a child in Africa who is confronting the devastating effects of the HIV/AIDS crisis.”
Determined to design an experience that would realistically emulate the real-life struggles of the children they were trying to help, Yoder and his team immediately set to work. In order to keep costs in check, almost all design and development tasks were completed in-house. World Vision’s internal creative team collected stories and photos of African children and villages. Next, team members identified four children impacted by the disease, and wrote detailed, factually accurate scripts depicting each child’s story. Finally, they built a 3,000-square-foot replica of an African village filled with props connected to each child’s life.
With the experience built and ready, the time had come to put the new experiential event strategy to the test. But Yoder admits that step was one he took with trepidation, despite being confident that his team had replicated the realities of Sub-Saharan life as best they could. “We didn’t know whether we had struck the right tone, or whether people would think it was goofy and unrealistic,” he says. “Would they scoff and laugh? Would it be well received?”
“World Vision Experience: AIDS” debuted at a Christian youth-pastor conference in Sacramento, CA, in 2005. Attendees entered a multisensory exhibit featuring four separate “life lanes,” each of which followed the journey of an African child whose life had been gripped by AIDS. Guests donned earphones and listened to a narrative audio account of their child’s life as they walked through various vignettes along their path. Those who heard the story of the young Ugandan girl “Babirye,” for example, listened to a detailed account of how she watched her father die and then her mother grow weak — while wondering if she would be next. In one of the most riveting scenes of Babirye’s journey, guests entered a replica of a grimy bedroom in her family’s hut, then sat on a small cot as they listened to an audio passage explaining how Babirye herself sat on the edge of this very bed and struggled to help as she watched her mother writhe in pain due to the ravages of AIDS.
Yoder’s team designed the four individual life lanes within the experience to converge in a sparsely appointed Clinic and Resolution Corridor. There, attendees sat on a long wooden bench and waited for their child’s name to be called as they watched a man in a white lab coat and latex gloves, his face obscured, working behind a small window off to the side. The minutes ticked by until finally attendees were instructed to walk to the window and place their palm on the window ledge so that the faceless clinician could stamp the back of their hand. A “negative” symbol indicated that an attendee’s child was virus free; a “plus” sign indicated that the child had contracted the HIV virus.
The emotional wallop then continued in the Chapel, where guests lingered as they reflected on their experience. The Prayer Wall, a 15-foot-long corkboard, gave attendees space to post and read notes about the experience, while the Hope Wall featured pictures of hundreds of children waiting to be sponsored.
“Immediately, we could see how deeply impactful it was, and we knew that it had applications that extended beyond any one event, venue, or audience,” Yoder says. Attendee response to the experience was so positive, in fact, that Yoder soon began to consider the possibility of conducting a multi-city tour boasting appearances in hundreds of U.S. cities.
CAREFUL CONVERSION
While Yoder’s idea of a touring event had significant potential, the problem, says World Vision director of executive communications Dean Owen, was that the experience hadn’t been designed to withstand the rigors of continual touring. “It was never meant to be shown in several different venues,” he says. “The physical construction of the exhibit and the materials that were used didn’t allow it.” In fact, by 2006, the exhibit had been shown in only a handful of venues but it had already begun to show its age.
Size was another issue. At 3,000 square feet, finding venues large enough to host the experience would prove difficult. There were also logistical concerns because the prototype exhibit was built of heavy materials, and required a forklift and loading dock to take it off the truck. In addition, a specialized setup crew had to be flown in for each installation — a process that took 14 to 16 hours over the course of two days.
If World Vision was intent on taking its experiential show on the road, a redesign was in order. But doing so, Yoder says, would require additional investment — a step that World Vision never takes lightly. “As a charity, we have to be very conservative about how we spend funds. We have a publicly stated overhead, and only a very specific percentage of the donations we receive can be spent on fundraising. In addition, we have to be very careful of investing those funds wisely,” he says. “That means that any new effort is quite appropriately scrutinized to determine whether it will have the right return on expectations relative to the money invested.”
To ensure that the expense necessary to ready the experience for a nationwide tour would indeed yield the right results, Yoder did his due diligence. “I spent an entire year writing a business case and building and testing various economic models in order to determine the worst-, expected-, and best-case scenarios that we might reasonably anticipate in terms of donation dollars,” he says.
When his exhaustive analysis indicated that the experience would indeed generate a positive ROI, World Vision made the commitment to commission two identical mobile exhibits (one of which would tour the East Coast, the other the West Coast) and to launch a 70-stop national tour.
SCENES FROM A LIFE
With the green light given, Yoder immediately enlisted the help of The Brand Experience, a Cincinnati-based event-management company, which assumed responsibility for tour planning and logistics. He also procured the services of The Production Network, a Seattle-based design company that was assigned the task of creating two identical exhibits that could be easily set up and torn down, withstand thousands of miles of travel each year, and be capable of adapting to an array of venue sizes.
The resulting experience incorporated the same format and core elements (including the four life lanes, the clinic, and the chapel) as the original version, but was far more road-friendly. Each scene and vignette, for example, was reconfigured so that it could be set up inside the actual shipping boxes that would be used to transport the experience. Once unpacked, each of these boxes would open to reveal a scene from a child’s life.
The new, modular design had the added benefit of reducing setup and teardown time considerably, to only eight to 12 hours of setup time and six to eight hours of teardown time, versus 14 to 16 hours for setup alone. In addition, given the experience’s redesign, less space was required to house it. In fact, the new experience measured only 2,340 square feet — and was capable of adapting to even smaller venues by removing one of the four life lanes. As for transportation, the entire experience fit on one 53-foot-long tractor-trailer.
Last but not least, World Vision and The Production Network threw in additional touches that further enhanced the authenticity of the exhibit. Added to the props list, for example, were several items brought in from the villages depicted in the experience, such as cooking utensils actually used by the children and even pieces of their own clothing. During the redesign, World Vision also invested additional resources into collecting information about new children, and team members traveled to Africa to work directly with four children in their villages.
FAITHFUL PARTNERSHIPS
Yet another step that World Vision took before hitting the road in earnest was to create an extensive partnership program aimed at enlisting the support of churches in each community the tour would visit. These churches, Yoder notes, represented ideal partners for World Vision for a number of reasons. “They are aligned with our cause-based mission and have everything we need to be successful: a facility that they make available at no cost, a strong and established volunteer base to help us staff and run the exhibit, and deep networks in their communities, which help us to get word out and draw an audience.”
In return, World Vision provides churches with a museum-quality exhibit, a comprehensive volunteer-training program (consisting of print materials and prepared, hands-on learning exercises led by trained facilitators from both World Vision and The Brand Experience), and all of the planning, marketing and promotional tools and templates they need to make the experience a success. “Most churches recognize the experience as an opportunity to get involved in an important cause and bring an important issue to life in their communities,” Yoder says.
Just how good a partner these churches have been is evidenced by the results the event has achieved since the two mobile versions of the experience first hit the road in August of 2007. Since that time, more than 161,664 people have attended the event at 74 venues. Of those, 18,273, or 11 percent, of attendees have walked out of the exhibit and signed up on the spot to sponsor a child affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis, translating to an estimated $11,511,990 in sponsorship dollars generated to date.
Hitting these numbers, Yoder says, is a huge accomplishment for World Vision on several levels. For one, it’s a nearly 100-percent increase over the project’s initial sponsorship-response goal of 6 percent. In addition, World Vision has long made a practice of sponsoring concert tours during which a popular artist will share a video testimonial about traveling to Africa and make a personal appeal to audience members to sponsor a child in need. “Normally, we’ll achieve a 3- to 4-percent on-site sponsorship rate at those concert events,” Yoder reports. “That’s considered good. So to be able to achieve an 11-percent on-site sponsor rate from an event like this with no celebrity endorsement whatsoever is just incredible for us. There are very few things we have done in the past that have been this successful in terms of ROI.”
Beyond these dollar metrics, the event is also helping World Vision to educate, inspire, and move people to respond by taking action. “Even when they don’t make a financial commitment, time and time again we’re hearing from attendees who tell us that they feel a call to participate in HIV/AIDS advocacy following their tour through the experience. It’s a transformative result that we know will have a lasting impact on the children, families, and communities we’re trying to help.”e
he facts are well publicized. The statistics, staggering. But despite the endless feed of news stories and graphic images decrying the dire circumstances associated with the AIDS crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa (a region that is home to more than two-thirds of all people on the planet living with HIV/AIDS), this catastrophic milieu of human suffering often fails to capture Americans’ attention, let alone motivate them to get involved. 
