We Are The Solution was a 2022 brand awareness campaign by ALIMA, the Alliance for International Medical Action. This entry is specifically for the US campaign.
Based in Dakar, ALIMA provides medical care to some of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most challenged regions. ALIMA’s model is built on connecting and expanding local networks of experts and pooling resources across aid workers, health clinics, and supply centers to provide medical care that is urgent, quality, and sustainable.
+7M patients treated across 13 African countries & Ukraine
+1M COVID vaccines administered
90% of programs focus on vulnerable populations in conflict zones
80% of beneficiaries are mothers & children
From low COVID vaccine accessibility to the outsized impact of climate change on regional agriculture, the areas in which ALIMA works suffered disproportionately in 2020 and 2021. More than ever, there is a pressing need to bring medical aid capacity and resources to these regions, especially the dangerous conflict zones that would otherwise go without care during this crucial time.
We Are The Solution championed locally-led medical care and underscored the need to invest in homegrown humanitarian solutions that build long-term capacity by supporting local health workers and researchers. The beautifully poignant campaign was created by celebrated French-Senegalese artist Lossapardo and inspired by the real stories of ALIMA’s health workers. It follows one boy’s transformative journey from grief to hope as he transcends the preventable loss of a parent to become a doctor, serving and saving his own community.
As an international organization with communications teams across Dakar, Paris, and New York, ALIMA faced the unique challenge of building a campaign that resonated across continents and could be easily adapted for varying audiences.
Through collaborative creative discussions between ALIMA’s international teams, Socialclub, and Entertain Impact, we worked through how the concept ideated by the French team could be adapted for American audiences, and then got to work making it come to life.
The heart of the campaign is an animated video, hand-painted by Lossapardo in his distinctive style. For the American campaign, we wrote the narration script and produced the voiceover, designed campaign graphics, created copy for the landing page, advised on the site layout, and developed key campaign messages – finding the right balance between inspiring poeticisms and ALIMA’s research-driven work.
We Are The Solution is ALIMA’s first awareness campaign in the US. Without any previous campaigns to build off or gain insight from, we knew our launch plan needed to be highly strategic and agile. To give us this flexibility, we kept the campaign entirely digital, focusing on Facebook ads and Instagram micro-influencers.
For our micro-influencer engagement, we had several influencers engage, including medical professionals, industry experts, and maternal care influencers. Supporters ranged from Badara Ndiaye, who has 119,000 followers on Instagram, to Dr. Wekon-Kemeni, who has 3,300 followers, but an impressive 9.48% engagement rate. Throughout the campaign, we adapted to influencer-created content to allow for more creativity and user-generated content that gave the influencers brand consistency.
In total, the campaign ran for 5 months and was reinvigorated throughout, from refreshed campaign content to activations around holidays like World Health Day. As we learned about ALIMA’s audience and brought in new supporters, we were able to adapt to what resonated and, ultimately, bring to life a successful first-time awareness campaign that married artistry, humanitarianism, and ALIMA’s scientific innovation.
Our goal was to raise awareness of ALIMA in the US among potential future donors to support ALIMA’s work building homegrown humanitarian solutions.
We measured success throughout the campaign using the following KPIs:
Total audience reach
Percent increase in traffic to ALIMA’s English site
Percent increase in ALIMA USA’s social media followers
Percent increase in social media accounts reached
Percent increase in social media profile views
At the end of the campaign, here is how we performed:
Total audience reach: 1,436,113
Website traffic increased 1234.96% compared to the prior period
84% increase in ALIMA’s Facebook followers and 25% increase in ALIMA’s Instagram followers
13634.7% increase in social media accounts reached compared to the prior period
421% increase in Facebook profile views and 164% increase in Instagram profile views
What’s more, we were able to achieve these results at costs below industry averages. For our Facebook ads, our cost per click was $0.49, compared to the cross-industry average of $1.01, and our cost per thousand impressions was $7.76 compared to the cross-industry average of $13.49.
As a relatively small humanitarian organization, and one with little to no prior presence in the US, ALIMA considers this campaign a huge success in their goal of growing their base of supporters and, ultimately, their impact as they build local medical care capacity and provide innovative, life-saving treatments in some of Earth’s most challenged regions
