Social advertising and non-profit campaigns from around the globe

Have any books lying around?

Posted by Marc | 24-04-2008 22:57 | Category: Awards, Education

This guerilla campaign from last year just won silver at the New York Festivals in the category WorldMedal. The campaign is from the Greenville Literacy Association (GLA), the largest community-based adult literacy program in South Carolina USA.
They needed money for their literacy programs. The bounce agency helped them organize a giant book sale. In order for the sale to work, they needed tons of books donated to their sale so they could in turn sell the books to raise money for their literacy programs. The job was to get as many books donated to GLA as possible.
The campaign title: ‘Have any books lying around?’

Because the budget was minimal, they felt guerilla tactics would allow them the best opportunity to attract attention to the book donation drive.
In the first stage of the campaign they got a local production company to donate materials to help them wrap staircases in public parking garages. The resulting wraps transformed the staircases into giant stacks of books to remind people of the books that they have lying around their homes.

They also approached grocery store chains asking them to give up shelf space to allow GLA to place books on their shelves. With their approval, they selected spaces on grocery aisle shelves and placed books in the middle of the cereal boxes on the cereal box shelves – smaller books on the drink shelves, etc. - hoping that it would remind people of books on their bookshelves at home.

80,000 books were donated to the sale. And almost $120,000 was raised from the sale of the books for literacy programs.