ColaLife

How a group of individuals persuaded Coca Cola to help Africa’s children

ColaLife is the brainchild of Simon Berry. It is a personal and voluntary campaign for him and his associates. The man and the mission are indissolubly linked.

When Simon graduated in 1977, he joined the British Government’s Aid Programme, living and working in South America, the Caribbean and Africa. In 1988, this work took him to North East Zambia to help to local councils plan and implement a local development programme. “North East Zambia is very, very remote. I was horrified to learn that one in five children dies before the age of five – that’s four deaths per minute in Africa alone – and they die mostly from simple causes like dehydration from diarrhoea… but I noticed that, despite the remoteness, virtually everywhere we stopped you could get a Coca-Cola. This set me thinking: why couldn’t Coca-Cola use their distribution channels to distribute oral rehydration salts to the people that needed them so desperately?” says Simon.

However, in 1988, there was no telephone and no internet; the post took three weeks. Simon couldn’t get any traction for his idea.

Twenty years on, the situation remained bleak; child mortality statistics hadn’t changed and in that time 40 million children would have died in Africa. In May 2008, Prime Minister Gordon Brown hosted the ‘Business Call to Action’ conference and asked companies what they were going to do in the fight against poverty in Africa – an initiative to be adopted by the UN. Twitter alerted him that the conference organiser was broadcasting a ‘live blog’ – an online, text-based account of proceedings. The Chief Officer of Coca-Cola stated his intention to grow their ‘Manual Distribution Centres’ in Africa and said that the increased employment that resulted would help reduce poverty. “There was no social element; the proposal was purely economic. I immediately contributed my ‘ColaLife’ rehydration salts idea via the live blog … but got no response.”

Using his personal blog, Simon posted a description of the ColaLife idea. He included a photo with a Creative Commons license from the photo sharing application Flickr. It pictured Coca-Cola being delivered by horse and cart in Dakar. He phoned Coca-Cola and pointed them to the article, but “I was fobbed off so I decided to set up a Facebook group and invited friends.”

The Saturday edition of BBC Radio 4’s PM programme is interactive and is formulated each week by listeners via the iPM blog. Simon proposed a debate on the ColaLife idea but it was not picked up. He tried again a second week without success. “In the third week I asked everyone I knew who wasn’t named Berry to pile in and say it was a good idea.”iPM became very keen and Simon was interviewed by the presenter, Eddie Mair, straight away. This two-minute interview was then used to pull in other contributors to the feature. The iPM team put in several days work, including extracting a statement of interest from Coca-Cola and persuading Eve Graham, the voice on Coca-Cola’s most successful advertising campaign, to sing alternative lyrics the New Seekers hit ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’.

This resulted in an invitation to meet Salvatore Gabola, Coca-Cola’s global head of stakeholder relations, based in Brussels. By this time the Facebook group had grown to 300 members and Simon promised to pick up the phone to Mr Gabola when the number reached 1,000. To his amazement this happened within ten days. By the time they met in Brussels more than 2,000 members had signed up. Mr Gabola agreed that the ColaLife idea should be incorporated into the research into the distribution network that Coca-Cola was planning as part of their Business Call to Action commitment. He also agreed to link up with Coca-Cola’s field researcher, Adrian Ristow, in Ethiopia and Tanzania, and Simon’s wife Jane converted Adrian’s regular email reports into articles and pictures on Simon’s blog.

People started to cluster around the ColaLife idea. The iPM’s Jennifer Tracey monitored and reported progress on the iPM blog. Tielmann Nieuwoudt, a logistics consultant in emerging markets helped by providing photographs and advice. Kate Andrews, a writer on social design and innovation, learned through Facebook that she had been at university with Simon’s son and set up a ColaLife Flickr group which quickly attracted 300 members. As a result of Kate’s Flickr site, the design community cottoned on and, entirely free of charge, began working on designs and materials for the medical containers later known as ‘ColaLife pods’ – a prism-shaped pod that nestles between the necks of the bottles.

As a result of this publicity Simon was invited in November 2008 to Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania to meet representatives of Coca-Cola, charities including Save the Children Fund, and local non-government organisations (NGOs) concerned with microfinance and the distribution of social products. Simon took his folding bike and a GPS device so he could mark locations and revisit them two days later to record the scenes on video for the blog.

In his travels Simon learned that the Manual Distribution Centres are not owned by Coca-Cola: distribution and bottling is independently-run by local entrepreneurs. Their staff were dismayed at the prospect of replacing one bottle in a crate with a ColaLife pod, but they were receptive to the alternative design which sat in the gaps between the bottles. “Coca-Cola’s fabulous distribution system is entirely driven by profit. ColaLife mustn’t damage it … but it could even enhance it. For example, we could promote the larger pods by paying the carrier double the profit margin they would have made on the displaced bottle.”

Simon concedes that the ColaLife initiative didn’t get ‘viral growth’ – the project developed in a rather traditional way. Peaks in the graph coincide with radio broadcasts and newspaper articles. But much more progress has been made than expected. The ColaLife Facebook group now has over 7500 members and the number is increasing by 10-25 per day. People have started ColaLife sub-groups on Flickr and a completely independent group in The Netherlands has taken up the challenge. A Google search for ‘colalife’ brings up more than 10 solid pages of links related to the campaign.

The campaign is evolving as more people contribute their skills. “We are learning as we go and incorporating the ideas of others. What is actually distributed should be locally determined not dictated. It may be that oral rehydration salts are appropriate but it could be malaria tablets or tablets to sterilise water or condoms or something else. So we’ve moved to the idea of a ‘ColaLife Pod’ that could carry anything.”

These new technologies enable campaigners to reach influential people, but they also allow anyone to contribute freely in whatever way they can. In ColaLife’s case these voluntary influencers include the BBC Radio 4 iPM programme’s Eddie Mair, Eve Graham’s singing, Tielmann Nieuwoudt for his library of relevant photographs, David Wilcox for his video reports, Jane Berry for her wordsmith skills, Kate Andrews for her press articles in the USA, Edward Charvet of Trovus Revelations, Simon Cohen of the ethical PR company Global Tolerance, Dave Briggs for the ColaLife website and Jess Ponsford for helping to bring the ColaLife Pod concept to life.

By using a wide range of communications technologies, the ColaLife campaign achieved its initial objectives in a matter of months. The next step is to engage an international NGO to work with Coca-Cola to trial the ColaLife idea. Simon concludes: “Anyone could use this technique, it’s available to all. The technology just allows people to sign up. It enabled us to get in front of Coca-Cola within three weeks and to change the agenda. But ColaLife will mean nothing until we have properly monitored trials underway in Africa. That’s the next milestone.”