“I’m sure all of us have had a similar idea, so it’s great to see it come to life in such a simple way.” —juror Natalie Lam

“This idea made it easy for people to give to others. A simple twist on words, but a powerful change in people’s behavior.” —juror Mark Renshaw

Overview: The Food Bank’s mission is ambitious and important: to lower the rate of child hunger in Colombia. The charity also wanted to reach out to people who had never visited its website before—men and women between the ages of 25 and 40 living in cities with a population of more than 100,000 residents, those who usually make their purchases on the Internet. Sancho BBDO’s solution was innovative: turn e-commerce products into opportunities to donate.

•The goal was a 35 percent increase in the Food Bank’s online donations during the first trimester of 2015.
•More than 20 people worked on the project.
•The site took three months to produce.

Comments by Sancho BBDO:
What do you think are the project’s core features? “Instead of creating an advertising piece or a more appealing site, we converted each e-commerce product into an extension of the Food Bank. We spoke to the main e-commerce portals in Colombia to duplicate the photographs of some of their products—ovens, dishes, blenders and more. But then we used Photoshop to include the food that we wanted people to donate within each purchase. We showed visitors/donors that when buying a product for their own home, they could also help another home.”

What was the most challenging aspect of the project? “Colombia’s rate of child malnutrition is 13.2 percent, but in some regions of the country, it is as high as 34.7 percent. This dramatic epidemic has caused the death of more than 300 children in the country. Despite the need, the donations through the Food Bank’s different channels had not been the best before this project.”

What was the response? “We increased the amount of online donations to the highest ever in the history of the Food Bank. The donations were 118 percent higher than last year’s first trimester. As a result, more than 40 tons of food were delivered to 32,691 children suffering from malnutrition.”