40 Days 40 Smiles Case Study

Hello and welcome back here I am in Dantang  Kampala and what we’re going to do next is we’re   going to go and meet with 40 days 40 smiles or  also known as 40 40. They’re a small organization   who fundraise for children and orphanages they  mainly do that using Facebook and other social   media tools so let’s go and find out more about  the work that they do. Naturally because 40 days   over 40 smiles started on Facebook we continued to  run our campaigns on other social media platforms   so when twitter became popular then we started  to use Facebook and Twitter.

when Instagram became   popular because you know it has more visuals and  we said you know what these pictures and videos   are going to be able to appeal to our audiences  and so on top of the fact that our demographic   of the supporters and the people that we want to  continue to be change agents because a lot of the   work that 40 40 does is for us to get community  involved and not just sit around and think that   the powers that be are going to create some change  but what can you do as a person our tagline is   be the change you want to see and we literally  want to be the change that we want to see.

So we   targeted these people and realized that they were  the ones that were responding to us the youth were   responding to us and we continue to do that so we  hosted we host fundraising events where we’ve done   football we’ve done basketball we’ve done karaoke  we’ve done poetry and all this is targeted towards   our programs how do we publicize it again we use  our social media platforms so we have a hashtag   for a football event which you call FiveasideUG  we have a hashtag for quiznet which you call 40night   and all these things are measured in terms of  you know how many people are going to reach how   many people are going to see this and at our  highest we’ve had up to 1 200 people come for   an event but that’s after you have probably  it has been seen by 10 000 other people.

So   because of that we have been able to support so  many children up to today i think our numbers are   at about 3 000 ugandans but every other year  we just try to concentrate on a small segment   use our platforms for literacy for expression  for supporting their reading and writing and then   move on to another community.

Right now we’re in  a community called Kibole which is a slum area   and currently this year we have worked with at  least 500 children and during our work with these   children we realized that a lot of the content  that we are bringing to them was content that they   could not relate to so we would get westernized  stories and then try to edit them whether it   was Snow White or Cinderella and came to the  realization that they could not relate to any   of these they have not since no you’re lucky if  they have seen a television you know so where are   you going to start from.

And this was helpful to us  because then we could go back to the drawing board   and sort of try to figure out how to appeal to  them and this buffed the idea of children’s story   books that we wrote the project is called the  children that we were because we came from a place   of the children we were I wrote a story proud  of that so um we wanted these children to see   themselves through these characters to know their  places to see our rolex you know to hear about   about that border right there because that’s the  transport that they use and actually know that hey   this story is speaking to me.

Here close enough to  finally touch the stars to dance among the clouds   all he could think about was holding his  mother’s hand on a Sunday afternoon at the market   or digging his hands into losing soil  and plucking out a fat root of cassava   to add to his father’s pile.

So we wrote four books  which have 18 stories in total and four some have   four somehow five and they were written at no cost  again by volunteer writers who wanted to tell a   story that they thought would outlive them which  is what we hope and we’ve been able to distribute   these story books to the children we work with  but also because of the support of the people who   give to 40 40 we’ve also been able to donate them  across Uganda so two years ago we ran a campaign   where we asked people to buy books for a school in  their village at school in their community or even   schools that they thought were deserving from a  newspaper story that they had read or whatever and   we were able to raise up to a thousand books which  we then went and distributed to different parts of   Uganda Gulo so roti, Masindi and  Aganas is an island called Busi   and it’s also still we use social media to  market these books so we’ve been able to get   them into people’s households into other schools  that are able to afford them and for the schools   that can’t afford them then we donate them using  the funds that we’ve raised from the people that   we work with.

Another way in which social media  has been really helpful for us is that we’ve been   able to run campaigns which don’t even lead  up to an event for lack of a better word so   one of my most memorable campaigns is a campaign  called buy a brick well we literally were asking   people to buy one brick for a dormitory that  we’re building now this dormitory is uh in a   place called Luero it’s a it’s a the dormitory  is called happy times and at that time when we   found out about the construction of the dormitory  we thought we could not afford it we spoke to the   partners and they told us you know what we  want to have a bigger space for our children   because again there were children of all ages who  are sharing a very small space and they wanted   to expand it but they could not afford it.

So when  we spoke to them they told us that their bill was   about 8 000 dollars at that point maybe the most we  had raised was like a thousand dollars so   how are we going to do this overnight and so  we came up with a campaign called buy a brick   where we asked people to either buy one brick  or two bricks which were not literal they sent   the equivalent of the amounts and within about  10 days we had already raised half the amount   because of people’s generosity and the hashtag  buyabrick became so popular that so many people   know 40 40 as an organization that built a dorm and  that’s it.

What happened after that they probably   don’t know but because that hashtag which so  many people were able to construct a dormitory   and after that we have put up another dormitory  using the same exact um campaign and gone on to   do other work but also through just maintaining  the interaction with people on social media.