Title	EMOJI TURNS REAL
Brand	VI AGROFORESTRY
Product/Service	TREE PLANTING
Category	D01. Messaging for Mobile
Entrant Company	MRM//McCANN Stockholm, SWEDEN
Advertising Agency	MRM//McCANN Stockholm, SWEDEN
Production Company	CELLSYNT Helsingborg, SWEDEN

Name	Company	Position
Christian Söderholm	Mrm//mccann Stockholm	Art Director
Fredrik Sundqvist	Mrm//mccann Stockholm	Copywriter
Elin Hedensjö	Mrm//mccann Stockholm	Account Director
Sofia Finnman-Larsson	Mrm//mccann Stockholm	Account Manager

Creative Execution

We teamed up with a technical provider – in cellular technology – and made it possible to donate through texting the tree emoji that is already in your phone. For the first time ever – an emoji got a real value. Each tree emoji you text is equivalent to a donation of 2 US Dollars – which is the sum Vi Agroforestry needs to plant a real tree in eastern Africa. You can send up to 25 emojis in one text message. The campaign was launched in social media. We also promoted the tree emoji on digital billboards in Stockholm.

SMS donations to Vi Agroforestry has been on a record high level during 2015. The Emoji campaign has also reached out to a new, younger, audience and it has been getting a lot of attention from blogs, forums and on social media. Above all, we found a use for the emoji that is relevant and truthful. We have actually made it easier to give gifts through mobile phones.

Vi Agroforestry is a Swedish charity organisation that fights poverty and starvation in eastern Africa – through tree planting. Like charity organisations all over the world, they collect money through text donations. The problem is that people need to text complicated SMS codes to make donations. Since the use of emojis is the new global way to communicate, the Esperanto of the 21st century, we came up with the idea to make the tree emoji into a SMS donation tool. If you SMS one tree emoji, Vi Agroforestry can plant one tree in eastern Africa, if you text two, they can plant two.