Operation Smile South Africa is a non-profit, volunteer medical organisation providing free reconstructive facial surgery to thousands of children across Southern Africa. The majority of these operations are for fixing cleft lips and palates, which would normally cost over R5000 an operation. In order to continually provide these surgeries free of charge, they need funding from big corporations. The brief was to create a brochure that they could give to these businesses explaining who they are, what they do as well as motivate for funding.

We designed a brochure for the client, but didn’t feel that this had stand out value on its own, as big business receives hundreds of requests a day from NGOs. We wanted to give our client the opportunity of meeting with CEOs personally. So we devised a puzzle that would precede the brochure. The puzzle would be delivered to CEOs, but with a piece missing right over the child’s smile. A note encouraged CEOs to phone Op Smile for the missing piece, thereby giving our client a chance to personally deliver the missing piece and brochure to the prospective sponsor.

Client is overjoyed and has received positive feedback. They enjoyed a very successful medical mission to Madagascar in February 2008 as a result of sponsorship, providing over a hundred successful operations to underprivileged patients.