To Design For Social Good Campaigns, Get In The Shoes Of The People You're Trying To Help
You need real immersion in your client's world.
When I traveled to Northern Uganda in the fall of 2014, I didn't know what I was in for. My company had been working with organizations based out of Africa in a variety of countries over the last seven years. Northern Uganda was a region that we were new to; I had heard about the particular struggles, seen photos of the struggles, created fundraising materials that encouraged people to join up and address the issues. But while I "knew" all that was happening in there, I had also been around the block enough times to know that there are still some things that you don't truly understand until your feet are firmly planted on the soil. To say the least, it was a sobering reality check when I arrived in Lira, Uganda. I was suddenly seeing life through the eyes of the people living there and those doing good work there. This shift in perspective has a tendency to change things and, for me and my company, it changed the way we thought and did work from then on.