Asylum Aid

The numbers are heartbreaking. Over 3000* migrants died in 2015 alone while trying to cross the Mediterranean. 350,000* made it, only to be faced with a highly uncertain future. Yet no number can create the same emotional response as the picture of a child in a war-torn land, or the tale of one young girl’s tragedy.

It’s an ageless truth that human stories, ones that we can feel a personal connection with, have the power to make a big impact. It’s why we’ve recently seen so many articles profiling the victims of terror attacks. If only for a few lines, they are more than just a casualty - they become individuals who are worth remembering.

Asylum Aid’s mission is to secure protection for asylum seekers by offering free legal advice and representation. Since a lot of their work is with the most vulnerable and excluded individuals, they take a highly personal approach to what they do. It can, however, be challenging to shine a light on these individuals’ experiences when it comes to raising awareness and donations. What is (sadly) such an ordinary experience in a refugee’s life is often too extraordinary to even imagine for people living in the UK.

Together with Red Brick Road, our task was to create a campaign that would create deep emotional engagement and understanding, raise the charity’s profile and ultimately lead to donations. The key was to go beyond the headlines and news stories to highlight the realities of a refugee’s world.

This would require a less conventional method. And while showing was better than telling, there was one even more effective method:

“Experiencing something for yourself is the best way to understand it.”

The challenge now was deciding on how to make that happen. The solution would have to be framed in a way that would make sense to those who had never experienced or even heard anything like what these people had been through before. In addition, whatever the chosen route was, it would have to be simple and clear. There would be no time to immerse users in the legal complexities and complicated politics and human rights aspects of the subject. That meant coming up with something that could start from the universal before delving into specifics.

In the end, it was the experiences of the people we were trying to help that provided the right answer. As part of their ordeals, refugees had often been forced to make some nightmarish choices. For instance, having to decide whether to convert and marry a complete stranger or have sex with one. Since life is a series of choices, this would be a powerful way to create a simulation. And even better, there was an existing format that was both popular and fit all the requirements.

“Confronting people with the impossible choices that face refugees everyday with the hardest ‘would-you-rather’ questions ever.”

However, the idea was to make it look nothing like charity content, but to disguise it as something entertaining. The quiz would start out easy, with pretty standard questions. Then, halfway through, the questions would get very dark, very fast. With quiz-takers lulled into a false sense of security, we would shock them with real-life refugee scenarios. This jarring shift would also mirror how quickly a refugee’s life could be turned upside down, with little to no warning. After putting our users in their shoes, we would then show them how they could help.