MUMBAI: OMRON has been conferred with Bronze award for its online CSR initiative in India - Your Voice Their World at the 55th Annual CLIO Healthcare Awards. CLIO is the world’s most recognized international competition honouring talent in the fields of advertising & communications and awarding exceptional projects that push the boundaries of creativity in a given medium.
Omron’s initiative was acknowledged amongst a list of notable international entries in the highly competitive innovative media category for the innovative usage of the online medium, its unique appeal & objectives and the communication expertise put in by McCann Health India – Omron’s partner and creative agency for the campaign.
The campaign aims to create India’s largest audio library of poems for visually impaired by engaging the masses to record poems through a dedicated website www.yourvoicetheirworld.com and a mobile application. In a short duration of eight weeks, the campaign saw more than 2400 submissions. Various celebrities also lent their support to this cause by submitting recordings and encouraging their fans to do the same.
The poems are being donated to the National Association for the Blind, New Delhi, which in turn shares it with its own students and thousands of other visually impaired connected through its library network.
Commenting on the achievement, Mr. Takuichi Shimizu, President, OMRON Management Centre of India, said “Rendering Corporate Social Responsibility in a meaningful manner for people with challenging spirit has always been an integral part of Omron’s corporate philosophy. We started the project with the same intent and decided to opt for ‘crowd sourcing’ – contribution of recordings for the visually impaired by the masses. We believed that this concept will not only give us numbers but will also help us in generating awareness about the importance of our support for visually impaired as India has the largest population of blind people in the world*.”
“The concept was given shape in the form of a website and a mobile & facebook application. The usage of online & social media brought convenience & uniqueness. Enthusing the people to come and contribute a poem proved to be very challenging initially, however, the persistent efforts of the whole team, a flexible and effective promotion plan – based on facebook, twitter and focused online portals- paid off eventually. In a span of 8 weeks we were able to collect more than 2400 recordings of poems. We are all set to start the second phase of the campaign very soon.”
The project is an effort to further strengthen Omron’s support to visually impaired people in India to help them fulfil their dreams of education and overall development via audio-based accessible content. The company is also running a Digital Accessible Library of audio and e-books in association with The National Association for the Blind, New Delhi under the same project.
