AnalogFolk

Our friends at Canvas8 held an event recently on the recent rise of philanthropic activation from brands. Philanthropic rewards projects such as the Buckminster Fuller Challenge or the X Prize ($10m!) used to be the domain of independant juries, billionaires and governments (and perhaps even the people). Now, more and more brands are taking it upon themselves to gift aid and make things happen where help is needed most. Big brands are shifting their spend from shiny TVCs to ideas such as Pepsi Refresh. Even agencies are at it and encouraging their staff to snap to. It's not just taking responsibility for the product production process, the supply chain and the people involved, it's beyond that. Brands are shouldering even more than their own responsibilities.



One project we found interesting was Simon Berry's ColaLife. Simon and his wife have developed an 'aidpod' which fits into Coca-Cola crates with the ambition to piggyback the Coke's distribution network to supply vital simple medicines to the furthest reaching villages where rehydration salts do not reach but the sugary nectar does. It is an ambitious project. How do you keep the medicines secure? How do you track the medicines? How do you know what medicines the communities need? How does Coke deal with the implications of meddling with local health services? What we really like is how Simon has gone about progressing the project. He has crowdsourced his team of engineers and designers from Facebook, Google and Flickr groups. And he is looking for more. Simon is very humble about his ability to deal with the wily marketers at Coca-Cola ("they're much cleverer than me at this") but his honesty and openness in appealing to the communities of engineers and developers that can redesign or offer innovative solutions to getting aidpods where they are needed is what has moved the project from a pipe-dream to almost a reality. And if Coca-Cola can work out a PR party line that enables them to back this as a CSR project, ColaLife could get the backing it needs.