BRITISH HEART FOUNDATION
Experiential / Event
CHALLENGE
Studies showed that the South Asian community were twice as susceptible to heart disease when compared to the white British population in UK. Smoking shisha is a popular social activity amongst the South Asian youths. They believe it is safe and less harmful than cigarettes. This needed to change. Being their events agency, the British Heart Foundation decided to pose us with an interesting challenge. We had to create an experiential activity that would help spread awareness regarding this issue while capturing the attention of the ever elusive youth.
IDEA
The culture of shisha lounges had been on a rise for about 7 years and this was a cause of concern for NHS, local councils and policy makers. We launched The Shisha Lounge, which was a multi-sensory campaign designed to reach out to the youth with some hard hitting facts about the effects of smoking shisha. Through this project we were successful in reaching out to our main audience – the youth and their parents, by highlighting the ill effects of shisha. The Lounge reached London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leicester in the form of a mobile shisha lounge cum cinema where people could come in, relax and watch a 3 minute film with real life case studies. The invite only entry helped create intrigue and got the attention of the youth, who were otherwise a hard target to reach.
RESULT
For 4 years in a row we have successfully delivered more than 50 large scale events across 20 cities. We reached over 1.5million people through our engagement activities. We generated more than 6000 sign ups to the adult service 'Heart Matters' and more than 8000 sign ups to the kids service 'Artie Bear Club'. But with this campaign we were able to reach the youth with over 250 screenings which were held across 4 events and engaged with over 3500 young people.