Since Project Hello’s inception in the fall of 2003, we’ve spent our careers figuring out how to make a good living from doing good. The result is ecopop and ecopop.com
Project Hello, a random act of kindness, wasn’t the first time we had used our talents for the forces of good, but it was the first time we initiated, created, marketed, and managed a cause-related initiative from scratch.
Inspired from learning a local homeless man’s name, we stopped looking at him as a panhandler, but a person that we wanted to know more about and help. We wondered if our experience could work on a larger scale.
Originally, the idea was to distribute 5,000 of these giant nametags to homeless in Los Angeles over the course of one weekend. We thought it would be great if the homeless started a movement, or a sort of uprising, and every street corner was occupied by people holding up a sign, demanding that they be seen as human beings. We wanted the issue of homelessness to be front-page news, build awareness by giving the homeless a voice, and give homeless organizations a platform to offer solutions.
After months of mostly positive meetings with local homeless organizations to help with the distribution of signs, a unified effort proved to be impossible due to religious, political, or selfish motivations. Rather than let the idea die, we thought the idea could even have more impact if we distributed them to thousands of amateur and professional photographers around the world and let them photograph homeless people in their community. We would then compile the images for a website, a traveling photo exhibition, a free book, and whatever else presented itself along the way.
By appealing to the creative community and allowing them to make a difference by donating their time, talent, and materials, we were able to pull the entire project off without spending little more than postage.
For us, our eureka moment came at the 2004 Clio Awards. We were asked to speak about Project Hello and other cause marketing initiatives created by ad agencies. Not only we’re examples far and few in between, it occurred to us that the industry's best creative problem solvers were solving the wrong kinds of problems. It was at that particular moment that we decided it was time to put our problem solving abilities to good use.
The result was over 3,500 signs distributed in 28 countries; a comprehensive website with over 700 photographs; 15 national PSA’s; a traveling photo exhibition; worldwide media coverage in over 50 publications; and the recipient of The Advertising Community Together (ACT) 2004 Dove Award, the highest accord for socially responsible advertising.
How can you see yourself using your talents for the forces of good?
  
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