In March 2021 the second wave of COVID-19 affected India, and in a few months there were over 30 million documented cases, with a large number of cases remaining undocumented. We rolled out ‘India bane Maskpur,’ a 9-week campaign in India to promote mask wearing, leveraging the social media platforms of India-based nonprofit organizations like Sheroes, Breakthrough India and Arthan Foundation.

The Indian society values social cohesion and interdependence and this collectivism appeals to Indians. For this campaign, we are building on this assumption to create content that has cultural relatability and thereby, inspires virality. India is a diverse country with no single common language. It becomes important to localise content for different regions to be culturally and linguistically relevant. We customized our content to different cities/regions in India, and created messages in Hinglish (a mix of Hindi and English), with gradual inclusion of other major regional languages in India including Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali and Gujarati etc. 

Our catchy and colorful posts with a mix of illustrations, pop-culture inspired memes and photos and videos of real people worked well with the Indian audiences. Some of our posts have received over 40 million impressions in a matter of a few weeks!