Problem / Challenge
Red Cross is one of the largest not-for-profit organisations in the world, helping prepare, educate and support civilians for emergencies and natural disasters, such as fires, hurricanes and Typhoons. To help deliver impact at scale, American Red Cross focuses on fire preparedness educational content at a grassroots level. Running educational workshops with children through school programs and activations, however, due to COVID-19 and social distancing requirements, American Red Cross has only been able to reach 1% of children they usually reach each year, they needed to reconsider a new approach to deliver its key preparedness content, such as the ‘pillowcase project’.
How could we solve this? A voice experience to help support a digital-first fire preparedness program that hero’s American Red Cross’s new mascot ‘Pedro the penguin’, to deliver learning outcomes within both the classroom and at home.
Process
To help understand the industry landscape I lead conducting a program of research, evaluating ‘in-market experiences’, identifying common components, approaches to successful game design and retention for Smart Speakers. Following this, I conducted a survey, engaging with employers, teachers, parents and volunteers from Red Cross’s disaster preparedness initiatives to help identity adoption of their adoption Voice, the frequency they used them, common behaviours and experiences they had found to be effective on the platform as well as feedback for the types of content that was engaging our identified audience.
Using these insights I worked with American Red Cross and VERSA’s creative conversational AI team to develop a concept that heroes ‘Pedro the Penguin’ as your guide to helping you become prepared for fire emergencies. The complete experience leverages a voice actor, helping bring to life Pedro the Penguin throughout.
The experience runs a series of ‘lesson plans’ where Pedro the Penguin reads out a series of instructions for the end-user to complete. Each session is completely randomised, ensuring that no two sessions are the same. Within each session, users are served up ‘fire preparedness activities, such as stop drop and roll, ‘branding and general exercise activities’, such as ‘Walk like a penguin’ and breathing and mediation exercises to help relax users after playing a game.
To help add an additional layer of gamification, each activity is timed, encouraging users to try and complete the activities as quickly as possible. At the end of each session, players are rewarded with a custom-designed, special badge, accompanied with educational tips for parents to read up on about fire preparedness. For players who complete the series of activities in record time, will be rewarded special ‘rare badges’, with the aim for users to collect all 20 badges.
The experience has been designed to accommodate both solo player mode and multiplayer modes, to enable volunteers in the classroom or a parent at home to join in.
Outcomes
The project is now available on Amazon Alexa (For the US market only) If successful, the project is to be scaled to support additional languages such as Spanish and made available in other locations.
