RNLI online live launch map

Exhibited by
Jason Potts, managing director, Think Digital.
Added
March 19, 2014
Medium of Communication
Online.
Target Audience
Type of Charity
Public/society benefit.
Country of Origin
UK.
Date of first appearance
2010.

SOFII’s view

A brilliant idea from the Royal National Lifeboats Institution – donors can see immediately how many lifeboats are at that moment out at sea, possibly saving someone’s life. It’s fascinating to see where the boats have been launched from, how many there are and great to be able to find out more information just with a click of a mouse.

Creator / originator

RNLI.

Summary / objectives

To show the work that the RNLI is doing every minute of every day of every year to save lives at sea.

A 24x7x365 window into the very heart of the organisation’s mission.

Background

The Royal National Lifeboats Institution (RNLI) is a charity that exists to save lives at sea. It was founded in 1824 and since then has saved more than 140,000 lives. They provide an on-call 24-hour lifeboat service around the UK and Ireland.

Special characteristics

For an organisation that has been around for well over a century, showing the reality of saving lives at sea through conventional channels has always been an exercise in history rather than a real-time experience.

Through the magnificently simple yet deeply effective approach of linking the coxswains’ pagers to their website to show real-time and most recent launches, the RNLI have found a way to demonstrate to existing and potential donors that, at that very moment, they are doing the work that donors give them money for, without the need for a 100-page case for support brochure.

Merits

RNLI is using new technologies to bring to life its mission so clearly, so simply and so powerfully.

This campaign was featured at SOFII’s I Wish I’d Thought of That - Toronto 2013 by Jason Potts