League Of Hearoes

Objectives

The Client

Hear For You (HFY), is an Australian charity that helps deaf or hard of hearing (DOHH) teenagers overcome barriers to reaching their full potential.

There are 9,000 deaf or hard of hearing (DOHH) teenagers in Australia, and many still face a range of challenges in reaching their potential in life, love, career and work. These include being socially isolated by missing conversations and banter, social stigma, preconceived attitudes towards deafness, and having to work harder to capture conversations, lessons or social interactions.

Many of the people around them don’t really understand their challenges and 90% have never even met another DOHH teen. This means they can feel very alone, but HYF believes mentoring and workshops, where they can meet other DOHH teens, can help.

Campaign

The Brief

HFY’s goal is to increase the number of teens it reaches with its two programmes Life Goals and Skills and the Rock My World program. It wants to increase its reach from 77 people in 2016, to 250 in 2017.

The challenge set for the NGEN Award is how to help teens find out about the programmes, reduce stigma, and increase fundraising, with a budget of $50,000, and limited expertise. Its target audience is primarily DOOH teens, and secondly parents, teachers and other teens.

Results

The Campaign

Welcome to League of Hearoes. A secret world to connect Hard of Hearing (HOH) teens across Australia with in-game mentoring opportunities.

The team discovered that gaming, and the game MineCraft in particular, is a great equaliser among teens. In the real world, HOH teens are permanently aware of their disability, but in MineCraft there is no perceived burden of being HOH. Gaming allows all teens to remain anonymous, communicate via text and reach like-minded communities at scale.

They propose tapping into the game’s capability for online private servers to build an in-game community where HOH teens build their own world and manifest their destiny at the same time as making connections with other HOH teens as well as HFY mentors. League of Hearoes will be promoted to the HFY database, teen gaming communities and within mainstream gaming press, an existing MineCraft exhibition and cross platform notifications.

There are also opportunities for brands to tap into it and provide branded quests within the game community, which helps reach a fundraising target.

Judges Comments

"A new and innovative idea that could provide a new and innovative opportunity. This idea is unique to this charity and their specific challenge with lovely insight and a fantastic idea. An impressive entry."