Scout and Guide Association of Croatia and their reforestation campaign Boranka take Effie Croatia Grand Prix!
The prestigious Effie awards, which celebrate the effectiveness of marketing communications, were once again awarded at the Days of Communication in Rovinj. These awards are bestowed on the best agencies and advertisers for outstanding market communications in the areas of creativity, strategy and market achievement.
This year, the winners of the Grand Prix, and the winners of the Gold Croatia Effie 2019 are Croatia’s Scout Association, with the primary agency Imago Ogilvy and Bornfight, for the Boranka campaign, which competed in the category Positive changes: non-profit sector. Boranka campaign also won Best in show award in Mixx competition for best digital campaigns and a gold at IdeaX competition for most creative campaigns. With these awards, Boranka campaign becomes the most awarded campaign in Croatia, staying in front of all other commercial campaigns and famous brands with huge advertising budgets. This is also the first time ever a non-profit campaing won a Grand Prix Effie award, leaving all other great commercial campaigns way behind.
Croatian Scouts started this campaing in 2018. in order to help in afforestation activities in parts of Croatia burned by wildfires, which devasted hundreds of thousands of acres of forests. In the campaign, Scouts gathered huge support and gained great public and media visibility which resulted in more than 2500 volunteers planting more than 25,000 new trees in 8 weeks of afforestation actions. The campaing was supported by relevant Croatian ministries, European parliament and many national and international institutions and companies like Ikea, Greenpeace, WWF…
The campaign also brought education activities to schools and kindergartens on the topic of nature and forest protection and climate change. More than 5,000 children were directly involved in workshops.
As a creative part of the campaign, tree leftovers from pine trees burned in wildfires (in Croatian pine tree is called bor – hence the name Boranka) were used to create unique crayons – called Boralica. These crayons were distributed in 115,000 pieces throughout Croatia and everyone was asked to use them to draw their own trees. They could take a photo of their drawn tree and upload it in our virtual forest, situated on a special Boranka campaign web site. For each and every tree planted virtually, Scouts and other Boranka volunteers planted a real one in nature. Soon, the whole country started to draw trees and thousands joined to help the campaign. Eventually, Croatian prime minister with other ministers and members of Parliament also joined the campaing and planted their own trees. The campaign received huge media attention and more than 300 media publications were published about the campaign.
Scout and Guide Association of Croatia is continuing the campaing this year aswell, planning to enroll even more volunteers and hold even more education activities.
This article has been written by the Scout and Guide association of Croatia