Supporting Mother Miracle School during COVID-19

About Mother Miracle School

Mother Miracle School is a high-ranking, non-profit K-12 English school with 60 dedicated Indian paid employees and 588 enthusiastic underprivileged students.

The students come from impoverished backgrounds. For the most part, each family with 5-7 members lives altogether in a single room. They typically share one water pump and bathroom with 35-50 other people. For $50 per month, people can sponsor a child out of a slum area and change their life forever at Mother Miracle School.

The Project

Mother Miracle School’s founder Shahla Ettefagh sat down with me and shared her story about how India became the global hotspot for the COVID-19 pandemic, counting the world’s highest numbers of daily new infections.

The student’s parents were losing their jobs due to lockdowns and could not feed their families anymore. At the same time, some sponsors dropped their sponsorships because they thought the school had ceased operations or their financial priorities changed during an unstable economic situation overseas.

We had to bring the situation of these families to the public’s attention and find ways to raise funds to help. Also, we had to show that while the school was officially closed, the students’ education continued online, and every sponsorship was important.

Expanding the audience reach

1. The sponsor experience

We decided to present Mother Miracle School to more people in the “Attract” stage first to expand the reach of our message online. Instead of letting Shahla Ettefagh talk about the school, I suggested we let the sponsors share their heartfelt stories with the audience, explaining the benefits of Mother Miracle School in the process.

So we reached out to four long-time sponsors of Mother Miracle School to send us their recordings, and I began producing brand storytelling videos about their experience. The videos were published on social media, reaching up to 52,000 views, and presented at Zoom fundraising events, providing a unique view of the school.

2. Students in the spotlight

With the success of the sponsor videos, we started to interview the students and let them tell the audience how Mother Miracle School changed their lives. More than six videos were produced in that time, counting up to 36,000 views on Facebook alone.

Engaging the audience

After we established the new audience on Mother Miracle School’s social media profiles and website, the organization decided to start the campaign for the COVID-19 relief fund. One of the main objectives of this initiative was to provide food for the hard-hit families which couldn’t sustain themselves anymore.

A food package contained rice, beans, oil, flour, sugar, tea, and salt for one month.

The following video shows a day at Mother Miracle School during the food delivery days. It is one of the many assets I created to provide more transparency for the donors and drive engagement. The video drove 32,000 views on Facebook.

After eight months, the campaign reached its milestone, with 19,000 people receiving food from the school. The food initiative would run for two more months, totaling 24,000 people. It was a significant success for a school that had no experience providing this much-needed help to keep the community intact.

Results

The online marketing activities for Mother Miracle School helped the organization almost to double its followers on Facebook, increased engagement to an all-time high, and successfully pushed a daring initiative that helped a whole community.