How We Have Improved Awareness On The Shriram Elocution – Contest Organised By Shriram Group

THE CHALLENGE

Nowadays the interest in Tamil has been going down, mostly everyone prefers English medium over Tamil medium, thus kids lose interest in Tamil. So, our main challenge was making them (schools & colleges) learn Tamil and understand its importance through competitions.
We set up 10 major centres in 10 major cities so that the surrounding places all over Tamilnadu can be covered with those centres. We also made sure those centres were located near bus-stands and railway stations for easy access.
Out of 20,000 institutions in Tamil Nadu, we were able to connect to around 10,000 through direct mail with the help of the available database. Communicating to the remaining was a challenge and towards this we used press releases, scrolls in our media partner TV, and reached out schools & colleges across regions from regional branches of the client.
Media-nisation was our strategy for extensive outreach. We used engaging SMS contests on Thirukural to grab the attention of people for viewing the programme.
Only 4 hours of time was allotted for each of the preliminary and semi-final rounds held respectively in the morning and evening sessions on the same day and under four categories, namely, Junior, Senior, Super-senior and College. The challenge was to choose outstanding 4 candidates (one under each category) out of a total of around 300 for finals. This we achieved through dividing students into groups under each category and screening the best one out of these groups under each category.
For effective selection and choosing the right talent we stepped up the jury panel at each levels – i.e., single judge for preliminary round, two member jury for semi-finals and three member jury for finals.

CLARITY OF GOALS

The Thirukkural competition as a CSR activity for enhancing awareness on the teachings of Thirukkural among the student community in the state.
Our goal for SRIRAM ILLAKIYA KALAZHAGAM was to refresh the young minds (School & college students) for a better understanding on the richness of values the Tamil language treasures.
To incite the growing generation’s interest for Tamil Language and encourage the articulation talent.

CLARITY OF INSIGHTS and CREATIVITY

We followed a systemised and organised form of work in our company.
We set Proper Pronunciation, Creativity of the Content, and Presentation of Speech as the criteria for judging winners.
Equality – Only 14 students from each institution / school was selected to ensure non repetition of winnings by a particular school.
Attracting students with easy topics and awarding one month time prior to the event for preparation.
Divisions – the contestants were divided into senior, junior, super senior, and college.
A4 posters for promotion, creative LOGO, badges, application form with clear details on participation, and certificates for winners and participation certificates to cheer the participants.
Each round was judged by well qualified judges and the final round was judged by single judge for first round, two judges for the semi-final round and three different judges for the final round.
Exhausting all possible mode of publicity – event management, posters, direct mailers, SMS, TV scrolls, Door-to-Door campaign, Press Releases dissemination, Photo Opportunity Sessions and Telecast of competition in TV – for extensive reach.

ALIGNMENT BETWEEN STRATEGY AND EXECUTION

Media-nisation – We used engaging SMS contests, scrolls and telecast of completion in Makkal TV for wide ranging awareness.
Choosing centres strategically to cover important cities and surrounding areas across the state.
Used all possible mode of publicity – event management, posters, direct mailers, SMS, TV scrolls, Door-to-Door campaign, Press Releases dissemination, Photo Opportunity Sessions and Telecast of competition in TV – for bigger reach.
Efforts put in for an extensive database of educational institutions of the state for wider participation.
Thirukkural Compettion 2016 witnessed participation of as many as 1918 students from across the 10 centres.
Jury panel was fortified with eminent judges including Tamil Film Director Badri, Tamil Film Lyricist Kavignar Snehan, Tamil Writers Soma Valliappan and Tiruppur Krishnan.

MEASURABLE RESULTS

Across curtain raiser, pre-event releases, post-event releases and publicity for telecast of the programme in TV, we got over 200 coverages in Tamil and English publications amounting to around 4,000 sq cm publicity space across regional editions of the state.

The English mainlines include: The Hindu, The Times of India, The New Indian Express, and Deccan Chronicle while the Tamil publications include Dinamani, Dinamalar, Maalai Malar and Dinakaran.

Our strong PR presence, good media rapport, 15-year long experience in continuous awareness on Thirukkural help us achieve big.