Dainik Bhaskar engages readers with 2 social initiatives
Ideas Blog | 17 February 2016
Dainik Bhaskar Group likes for its readers to be engaged.
The news media company engaged them with two very different, but very innovative projects:
- A contest for predicting the result of daily cricket matches.
- On a much more sober note, an initiative to provide relief for the monsoon-struck residents of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.
“The teams will play, but you will win”
“India is a cricket-crazy nation,” says Vyankatesh Purohit, an assistant manager for D.B. Corp. Ltd. “With the mega-event (FIFA World Cup) of the most popular sport on the planet coming up, we decided to engage our readers in a simple game of predict and win.”
So it set up activity stations across the country.
The company asked participants to predict the winners of the matches by sending in their answers via SMS, WhatsApp, and a Web site. The contest was a hit, receiving 591,833 entries during a 25-day period. Dainik Bhaskar received 352,722 entries through SMS, 136,988 entries through its Web site, and 102,123 entries through WhatsApp.
It advertised the contest in print, radio, and digital outlets, including Web sites (one million pageviews), Facebook ads, ads on the Facebook pages of .com Web sites, and YouTube. In Facebook ads alone, the total reach was 666,062, with a total number of impressions of over 3 million.
Jammu and Kashmir relief fund
In September of 2014, the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir was severely affected by a late monsoon rainfall, which wreaked havoc in the entire region. Many lives were lost. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless. Winter was fast approaching on the Indian sub-continent.
Dainik Bhaskar Group, known for its various social causes and for extending support and help to those in need, believed that its 19.8 million readers — spread across 14 states and 58 cities — had something to offer.
It requested they donate new, warm clothing — sweaters, jackets, shawls, blankets — to the victims of the calamity. To ensure the success of the initiative, Dainik Bhaskar Group ran print ads along with radio spots to promote the donations.
The programme had three stages:
- The collection of the clothing from more than 250 collection centres in 45 cities.
- Taking the clothing to Jammu and Kashmir.
- The most important step: distributing the warm clothing to those in need. Dainik Bhaskar Group traveled for 2,200 kilometres to carry out this step in conjunction with local authorities.

In all, 51,000 families in seven districts and more than 500 villages in affected areas received aid during a 10-day distribution process. Local people and state administrative authorities alike praised the initiative.