Marketing 18th Edition by William Pride,Ferrell

Exercise 3

UNICEF and the Good Shirts Project
The United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) was created in 1946 as a nonprofi t to protect the welfare and rights of children around the world. Wherever children are threatened by natural disasters, extreme poverty, violence, disease, and other problems, UNICEF works with local and international partners to raise money and deliver services to relieve suffering and meet basic needs.
Now UNICEF has teamed up with New York-based artists Justin and Christine Gignac, plus the online T-shirt retailer Threadless, on the Good Shirts Project. This is a combination fundraiser and educational program, raising awareness of the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa and raising money to provide clean water, food, health supplies, and other desperately needed items for children and adults in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti. "Hundreds of thousands of children are at imminent risk of death," Gignac explains. "Obviously, we need to do something to help, and are fortunate to have been included in this effort to raise money for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF to support lifesaving relief efforts."
Good Shirts follows in the footsteps of the Gignacs' previous "Wants for Sale" art series, where they created paintings of items and experiences they wanted-and sold each painting for the amount of money they would have to pay for the item or experience. Similarly, each of the UNICEF shirts is priced at the cost of buying what the shirt shows for people in the Horn of Africa. For example, the white T-shirt featuring a big, colorful mosquito sells for $18.57, which pays for three insecticide-treated nets to protect from malaria. The white T-shirt featuring a green cargo plane sells for $300,000, the cost of chartering a flight from UNICEF's warehouse in Copenhagen to carry aid supplies to Nairobi, Kenya. In all, the artists created a dozen eye-catching T-shirts with light-hearted images "to remind people of the good they're doing by buying one," says Gignac. Threadless produces the T-shirts and sells them online, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to UNICEF. The artists donate their time and designs, and the BBH New York ad agency provides free marketing assistance. "We're literally letting people wear their donation as a source of pride and as a means to spread the word," says a BBH executive. "If friends get a little competitive over who's being more altruistic, all the better."
To communicate with potential donors and keep the public informed about its services, UNICEF is an active user of social media. It has nearly 1 million followers on Twitter, where it uses the #goodshirts hashtag when tweeting about Good Shirts. UNICEF has nearly 2 million followers on Facebook and maintains a YouTube channel where videos are posted in multiple languages.
Good Shirts is one of a number of initiatives that UNICEF uses to call attention to world trouble-spots where children are in need of aid. When UNICEF's celebrity ambassadors, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Clay Aiken, and Laurence Fishburne, travel to these areas, they use their fame to spread UNICEF's message and attract media coverage. In a decades-old Halloween tradition, many U.S. children carry orange "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" containers and ask for donations as they go door-to-door in their costumes. No matter where in the world children are threatened, UNICEF is ready to help.
What kinds of objectives do you think UNICEF set for the Good Shirts Project? How should UNICEF evaluate the results of this project?