Marketing Efforts by Nonprofit Groups Win 14 Awards

A Nigerian woman who was to be stoned to death was at the center of a highly effective multimedia

campaign that won three Echo Awards for Amnistía Internacional, the division of Amnesty International in Madrid.

Winners of the Echo Awards, given by the Direct Marketing Association at its annual conference last week, were selected based on creativity, marketing strategy, and financial results of their appeals.

Counting the awards to Amnistía Internacional, 14 awards went to direct-marketing campaigns for nonprofit organizations — two gold, five silver, and seven bronze. Five of the 14 awards went to organizations in European countries.

The Amnistía Internacional campaign was waged on behalf of Safiya Hussaini, who had a child out of wedlock after she was raped by a relative of her former husband. She was sentenced to death by stoning for having had a child outside of marriage.

The organization, which used the services of CP Interactive, a direct-response agency, also in Madrid, initially had only 15 days from start to finish to solicit people to put their names on a petition protesting the sentence, though her appeal of the death sentence was later extended by a week. The campaign, which was part of an international effort to put pressure on the Nigerian government to lift the sentence, was waged through a variety of mediums, including newpspapers and magazines, radio, telephone, Internet, mail, and fax.

The campaign’s Internet site (http://www.amnistiaporsafiya.org) turned out to be the most successful of the approaches, yielding 600,000 names. Another 60,000 arrived by mail or fax, and tens of thousands of people telephoned a call center to add their names. The petition was turned over to the Nigerian ambassador in Spain.

Because time was short, CP Interactive says it sacrificed sophistication for accessibility and speed. To emphasize the immediacy of the campaign, the Web site included a clock that showed the time until Ms. Hussaini was scheduled to be put to death. The site was also updated with a count of the number of signatures collected thus far. The mailing contained an “urgent” stamp along with a stone, to remind recipients of how the woman would die.

Other awards included two for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, in New York, which won for a campaign to draw attention to the disease and for an ad featuring Mr. Fox and the boxer Muhammad Ali to show that the disease affects people of all ages and races and to broaden the organization’s appeal to minorities. Since the ad started running, in May 2001, the organization has raised nearly $1.4-million through a toll-free phone number and a Web site included in the ads.