My Ministers of Design Blog Post
Mumbai is a city of gross disparities, a monolith of have and have
nots, where the chasm between the rich and the poor is more like an
uncrossable abyss than a gap, with over 8 million of its dwellers living in slums. The growing income disparity is a sweeping trend that has, sadly, become all too prevalent in an increasingly globalized world, driving a wedge between the rich and the poor, who are having a hard time accessing even the most basic of social services. As the Share My Dabba video shows, every day 1.6 million people in Mumbai have food in their dabba, while 200,000 children go starving. The Happy Life Welfare Society, an Indian NGO, decided to do something about this, having worked on previous campaigns like Spread Some Warmth and Share Your Wealth.
Advertising agency McCann
came on board to help the NGO figure out the strategy and came up with
the "share" sticker. Whoever wanted to share his/her lunch put a sticker
on the dabba. Next, however, came the more difficult step--how to
collect the food and distribute it to the children without disrupting
the to-the-minute-precision of the daballawah system, a Forbes Six Sigma
certified system for its accuracy and a Harvard Business School case study.
Every day, 5000 Dabbawalas deliver 200,000 boxes per day using only
bicycles, relying on a complex series of collection zones, sorting
points, and delivery zones, supported only by a manual coding system.
So as not to disturb the intricate time balance of the system,
volunteers gathered at the point where dabbawallahs assemble after
having collected the tiffin boxes after lunch; there, they initially used
to empty the food from the containers into plastic bags and plates and
give it to the children. But a much better system was devised--The Happy
Life Welfare Society went to the slums and told kids and their families
about the distribution point so, now, they just come there with their
own utensils and are served food directly from the dabbas. All of this
has to work with clockwork precision as there can be no delay in the
dabawallah system--so the whole process is completed in 15 minutes.
The lesson that The Happy Life Welfare Society also learned is the
importance of actually talking to people to get one's message across,
i.e. literally the legwork. To accomplish the involved planning needed
for the success of this operation, volunteers had to talk to
shopkeepers, workers, and office goers to make them want to share the
dabba and involve them in the process, as well as the children living in
the slums and their families. It would be impossible to introduce the
system into a new part of the city without that educational campaign,
states Kanupriya Singh, the Vice President of The Happy Life Welfare
Society. There was a PR challenge from another avenue as
well--addressing the critics who took umbrage to children eating messy
leftovers, so the people sharing their dabbas had to also be encouraged
and educated on only sharing clean food.
Share My Dabba is an excellent example of the wonderful confluence
that happens when the message aligns with the successful execution of
the thought behind it. A minimalistic approach lends itself well to
snappy branding and messaging, but the importance of some good
ol'-fashioned talking to people is also clearly underscored in this
example.
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