In the chaos of demonetisation, ‘#KindnessIsCashless’ was a movement by Visa that aimed at inspiring acts of kindness amongst the digitally savvy Indian youth to help and teach millions of cash loving Indians across the country make every day cashless debit card transactions.
Philosophy
In India, film is the most powerful medium to get people’s attention. So we launched the ‘#KindnessIsCashless’ movement with a heart-warming film about a role-reversal where a student gave his teacher the most important lesson that the whole country could benefit from. Next we used radio jockeys, rappers, YouTube celebrities and war photographers, whose moving and inspiring images were turned into recruitment ads, social posts, calendar and exhibitions, to reach out to as many youth as possible. And to reach remote areas like the slums of the country, we created a new and unique medium – the ATM security guard. Here we tied up with security agencies and trained their guards for free. These guards in turn taught Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, how to go cashless in a simple and engaging manner, using Indian rhymes and Bollywood songs! And all this kindness, did help India in becoming more cashless
Problem
India was plunged into chaos on 8th November 2016 post the Government of India’s ban of all ?500 and ?1000 bank notes. In this context, our brief was to empower cash loving Indians with the knowledge and know-how on how to make cashless transactions with their debit cards. Here amidst the chaos we saw something beautiful. We saw acts of kindness. People going out of their way to help one another across ATM lines by providing them water, food and shelter from the baking sun. As we saw these acts of kindness grow, we realised Visa could do more. It could help direct the acts of kindness to help people in the long ATM queues get out of these queues. This led us to ‘#KindnessIsCashless’
Result
o Debit card transactions grew 100% o 50% more POS machines activated o 711 million more people used their cards for payment o 109 million less people used their cards at ATMs