I’m very proud of this work. Many people told me and my partner it was an impossible project. That we couldn’t do it with all 200 countries in the world, that we should settle for 30 to get the idea across. That we couldn’t get the stats for birth rates and diseases to make the site, and a whole host of other reasons to give up. But we persevered and I personally dug up facts, stats and spent a lot of time building excel sheets with data sets for the developers. In addition we filmed newborn babies and environments all around the world, then I matched each environment to the babies.

I also created Save the Children’s Facebook page and taught them how to use Facebook for fundraising purposes. They now have 170 000 fans for Save the Children Sweden. We created a Facebook widget that allowed you to place your new self and raise money on your page, very groundbreaking for a brand to do that at the time. We did localized geotargeted banners of what the probability was to be born in that area in Sweden. We did an event at the Central Station in Stockholm where people could spin an analogue Lottery of Life wheel. We last minute got free OOH media because of a cancellation so we quickly put together OOH executions using only stock.

The Lottery of Life is one of Save the Children’s most successful campaigns to date. 5% of the Swedish population participated — we had 500 000 unique users and their new selves on the site. The project was requested to be incorporated into the school curriculum all over Sweden and the European Union used it when educating police before serving in Africa. Save the Children wanted to adapt the campaign to multiple markets and the site is still live even though the first iteration was built in 2009.