On this year’s Global Handwashing Day, we look back at a successful campaign we delivered for Lifebuoy. As one of the world's top-selling hygiene brands, Lifebuoy is on a mission to tackle one of the biggest public health challenges: handwashing. 

The ‘H is for Handwashing’ campaign has won a prestigious Global Effie Bronze (a multi-region Effie, as it is also called) under the category of Positive Change – Social Good: Brands. 

Lifebuoy’s ‘H is for Handwashing’ campaign was conducted with the purpose of engaging children with the importance of handwashing to stay safe from germs, reduce infections, and improve overall hygiene. The award-winning campaign aims to transform the letter H into a symbol for handwashing so that H not only stands for Hat, Horse, or Hippo – H stands for Handwashing!

The campaign had already reached over 11 million schoolchildren worldwide by integrating hand hygiene into textbooks and other classroom materials. And while the benefits of handwashing are hardly news, Lifebuoy wanted to spark interest in the necessity of cleanliness. They spearheaded an online campaign that reached out to children of all ages, levels, and cultures in Asia-Pacific, Africa & Middle East. The campaign used fun visuals and sound to change the way children learn good habits.

The development process

Since Sogody had already built a microsite and revamped Lifebuoy’s old site, we were now collaborating to deliver the ‘H for Handwashing’ campaign—creating fun, interactive educational content for children and caregivers around the world.

Having a completely special design built out for this campaign, indicated that we had to create entirely new custom-built components, to achieve the result we wanted. There was a specific emphasis on building the user forms, which once completed correctly would provide the users the right to access the campaign books and documents. Another very important section was the integration of the interactive games in the campaign and ensuring that the users have a smooth experience while playing them.

Besides the technical implementation challenges, this campaign was built under a very expressed sense of urgency and a complex collaborative process between many teams. Our team, having previously implemented Lifebuoy Arabia as a master site, was responsible for creating an experience that would fit the needs of 3 Lifebuoy localized websites from other countries, which were going to launch this campaign at the same time. During this time, the brand team provided the content and copies which underwent a couple of versions until they achieved their best and final form.

The outcome

All in all, building this campaign was a one-of-a-kind challenge, which resulted to be a very successful experience, especially due to its impact during the pandemic and the excellent combined effort that was put into building it.

The Effie description captures it best, “Recognizing brands that are making the world a better place by using the power of their communications platforms for good…”. There is no better testament to what Lifebuoy stands for and we are proud to have been a part of developing the ‘H is for Handwashing’ campaign for them.