Today I read an article about the international airport of the Netherlands: Schiphol.
In april 2012 the campaign called: Share your Food and Feed a Child was launched by Schiphol in cooperartion with UNICEF. When a child is having diner in a restaurant at the airport it can give approval to share a link on its social media profile and by that the airport donates 20 cents to UNICEF. This money will be used for feeding children all over the world, for example in the Sahel, Africa. It was announched for a three-year period, but now, one and a half years later, the site www.schiphol.nl/shareyourfood is inactive and doesn’t seem to get much attention.
Has it failed? Didn’t it work out as both parties expected and canceled it earlier as they would like to?
I think the combination of social media and charities is a hard one, especially in an environment where your are not at first place using social platforms. Apparently children did not want to share it on their social profile, like Facebook, and the lack of interest made the campaign fail. But can these kind of campaign work in the future? I think the whole idea Schiphol and UNICEF had isn’t bad at all. It was mainly based on not only sharing on your online profile, but also sharing your meal with other children. That’s a good thing, but still it didn’t work out as well as they expected. Can it be a lack of marketing?
What do you think?
http://www.schiphol.nl/shareyourfood
http://hugin.info/135966/R/1605302/508344.pdf
In my opinion i think it failed because there was a lack of marketing. I never heard of the campaign before. What i think went wrong in the first place is that only kids could share the link if they were eating at Schiphol. The reach of the campaign would be so much larger if they allowed adults to share the link also. Nowadays there are a lot of charities on Facebook who started a campaign that is successful. Mostly the only thing you have to do is press the LIKE button. That is i think the third thing that went wrong, maybe kids thought it was too much of an effort to share a link instead of just pressing a LIKE button. The last one is that on social media there is a ‘upward spiral’. Once a Facebook page is popular more people tend to like it, then when it’s not popular.
It’s all for a good cause of course, but I think the implementation is just really, really bad. I mean, why the combination of children and social media? I know people start younger and younger with social media, but still this seems like a really small ‘target group’. So I think they never should have narrowed their target group like this and should have add adults too. Thereby, when you are at an airport there is a big chance you are in a rush. So you don’t want to be bothered with things like this, I think. Especially not while eating. I think it’s just better to make people donate money because of internal motivation.
I think overall the idea of social media and the combination with charities is a good idea to get support for a charity. There are so many people nowadays using one or more platforms of social media. Instead of just posting and tweet “nonsense” you can use your account more useful if you are involved with such initiatives. I think posting something on your wall or tweet about it will cost people less time to go to the website of a charity or go to their bankaccount and donate money. Nowadays everybody is so busy with everything that going to a certain website or to their bankaccount to donate money will not be done because it costs “too much time” for them. A tweet or post is done so easily and quickly that by doing this people HAVE time to do it and I think they use it more often. Also just tweeting about your meal will cost you nothing and the airport donates instead of you going to your bankaccount and donate money. I agree with “sjoerdklos” that the targetgroup is too narrowed, maybe if they had used “people eating a meal at the aiport” the campaign would have been more succesfull. I do not agree with “Sjoerdklos” on the airport rush thing. There are ofcourse a lot of people rushing at the airport but you need to be at the airport a few hours before the flight and almost always you have so many free time that you go for a coffee , a sandwich or whatsoever. There are people who don;t have time to post because of their hurry but there will remain enough people that have time. Also I think that using social media for charities is a good idea to make people more aware of charities and what their doing, it will make them more well known in a sort of unconscious way because if people “liking” the page of the charity they will read post of this charity unconsious when they look through the latest tweets and posts.
I think the basic reason why this project failed is the accessibility, and convenience. Imagine you are a child and when you are eating at an airport, you must have a flight to catch. So you have limited time, and there many things that you have to take care of, such as your passport, following plans of your journey. If posting the eating on social media is very easy for the child to do, and didn’t take much effort, he would’ve done it. For example, if he could simply upload the post with click on a screen prepared by the restaurant. However, in reality, you have to log in to the social media with your account, and then post. It’s quite tiresome. If the airport had prepared more cautiously, making the project more simpler, I think it would’ve succeeded.