Situation: ‘Left-behind Children’ accounting for 1 in 5 children in China is a massive social issue

In China, rapid economic expansion has created a situation where cities offer significantly more opportunities than villages. As a result of this millions of impoverished migrants leave their villages to move to cities in search of economic opportunities, to provide a better future for their children. Their children left behind in villages to be raised by their relatives, without their parents, are known throughout China as the ‘Left- behind Children’. China currently has over 69 million such ‘Left Over Children.

Brief

Leverage the might of Tencent’s 1.2 Billion monthly active user base (WeChat) to help alleviate the societal issue of ‘Left-behind Children’

Objective.

Create tangible action and awareness to improve the lot of ‘Left -behind’ Children in China.

Idea: Transform Children’s drawings that expressed their most cherished wish of meeting their parents into actual tickets that enabled their parents to meet them

Drawings made by ‘Left-behind Children’ were uploaded onto the platform, to serve as clickable icons to gather donations. These drawings were then converted into special palm-sized tickets and mailed to their impoverished parents to help them return to meet their children.

Strategy: Transform WeChat, China’s most ubiquitous and frequently used app into an instrument

of social change

In China, WeChat has replaced wallets. People use the mobile app for everything from making payments at restaurants to hailing cabs (via mini programmes) to paying their utilities. By using WeChat to promote the Magic Tickets platform, we were able to draw attention to how a small donation (less than the cost of a single bar of chocolate) could help reunite a family. These small individual donations aggregated on the platform turned into a significant amount to help impoverished migrant workers

Magic Tickets reached out to over a Billion people across 3 months

The Magic Tickets Platform leveraged the power of Tencent owned Webchat’s 1.21 billion daily active users. The platform was promoted across WeChat for a period of four months from May to August 2019.

Objective - Create tangible action and awareness to improve the lot of ‘Left -behind’ Children in China.

Magic Train Tickets captured the imagination of China’s collective consciousness…

· Over 1000+ news articles were generated by 300+ media organizations, including government-owned media garnering over 75 Million impressions.

· 8 A-list China celebrities and dozens of reputable KOLs volunteered to advocate this initiative (free of cost), resulting in earned media of over 1.2 Million USD.

As a result of which over 3 million participated in the campaign raising over a 120Million USD donations.

These donations helped tens of millions of families reunite across China and demonstrated the power of technology to alleviate a societal issue.