Background
Before the pandemic, for the past 3 years, the Dhaka Half Marathon organized by Dhaka Run Lords had been the biggest running event in Bangladesh. It would empower thousands to nurture their physical and mental health during Covid-19. The only way to organize a marathon this year was going digital. We needed a strategically executed proof of concept as this was never done in Bangladesh. After developing the online platform and technology, we had to organize smaller-scale virtual runs to troubleshoot and attract sponsors. Most importantly, we needed to teach the people of Bangladesh how to run a marathon virtually.
Description
In December 2020, the Dhaka Next virtual platform was developed. It enabled personalized paths, real-time tracking, leaderboards, and running maintaining social distancing. After registering and syncing their phones with the running app, Strava, runners could run anywhere in the world. The first 10K run was organized without sponsors as no one believed this was possible in Bangladesh. The event was pulled off with 1000 runners. Using this as the sandbox, we smoothed out the bugs, streamlined the UX and utilized the success to earn the confidence of sponsors. The target now was to educate the mass for the main event.
During the 3 month campaign, we carefully crafted a multi-faceted approach through our constant communication from social media platforms, video tutorials, weekly interactive live sessions with community veterans and our virtual runner’s bootcamp along with multiple trial runs. The Facebook page, along with the BD-Runners community was the hub for all our communication. We utilized highly targeted ads, expert running tips, instructions, user-generated content and inspiring stories for community engagement. We partnered up with our sponsors to execute concurrent co-branding campaigns to leverage on their existing brand visibility. PR coverage on radio, newspaper and television were insured to maximize the impact. Shakib Al Hasan also came on-board to motivate the passionate runners and share some valuable expert tips. In association with Women’s Horlicks, we successfully executed our women empowerment campaign as one of our key objectives this year was to break the social stigma and negative stereotypes surrounding women runners.
As a result, we managed to run, outrunning the pandemic. We lifted the spirits of people during the pandemic by spreading positivity and championing mental and physical health. We had more than 3100 participants across 51 districts in Bangladesh and 22 countries across the world. We not only ran on land, some even ran on ships in the middle of the ocean thanks to our versatile digital platform. Almost 500 women participated this year making it a milestone event. Above all, this was just the starting point as we managed to revolutionize the future of fitness and running in Bangladesh. In terms of social media numbers, the official Facebook page garnered 3.5M Impressions, 2.7M Reach and 140k Engaged Users (Facebook data based report powered by whatagraph.com) throughout the period. Additionally, 1.5M additional impressions (projected) were made from organic user generated contents, and 2.2M Impressions (projected) were generated through PR.
Project Overview AV
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