Unilever: Dirt Is Good Academy

Content Creation

The Dirt Is Good Project aims to inspire children to take more of an interest in the world around them. The digital education programme needed to include content that was globally translatable, educational, and most importantly, fun. With this in mind, we created The Dirt Is Good Academy, a brand-new educational programme that aims to create real, positive change among its target audience of children aged 12 and under. Brought to life with engaging visuals, gamification and customisable avatars, this programme guides the user through a series of missions, highlighting how they, themselves, can be part of the solution.

On entry to the programme, users play a quirky hypothetical-scenario game that determines their ‘Changemaker Personality Type’. Changemakers then access their very own ‘Mission Log’ dashboard, where they can learn about world issues such as climate change, poverty, and biodiversity loss, all broken down into digestible chunks with actionable tasks they can do to help make a difference.

Content includes short, snappy intro videos to start the learning journey for each topic, listicles of ten ‘fast facts’ – accompanied by engaging imagery, and offline, hands-on tasks such as ‘Start a Food Compost’ – where users are encouraged to take action against food waste and the consequences of intensive farming. Challenges are stored in their Mission Log dashboard as a tickable list, for them to complete in their own time. The programme acts as a safe space for like-minded compassionate young people, designed to lift and empower them to take action for good.

Brand Impact

A huge part of this brief was measurement – how were we going to prove the programme effectively creates Changemakers in the real world? For this, we decided to use a pre and post-topic emoji-style rating to measure kids’ propensity to act before and after engagement in the content, then measure the amount of ‘Challenges’ being ticked as complete. The Dirt is Good Academy soft-launched in the U.K. in February 2021 and in its first 4-weeks smashed our initial targets with over 700 registrants. This programme has been fantastic at educating kids on challenging topics in a positive, inspiring and empowering way. After a successful launch in the UK, we were asked to adapt the platform for the Thai market to inspire behaviour change in a whole new audience