The future is always in the hands of the youth, but oftentimes the next generation is maligned for its views and practices. Each generation tends to see the next one as not quite as good, and is quick to criticise what’s “wrong” with the generation that follows.

Dainik Jagran took a much different approach to the next generation with its powerful Sanskarshala campaign.

Sanskarshala, which translates into “School of Values,” was designed to inspire young people and help expand their worldview. It used the newspaper to start new conversations on the modern values that Generation Now holds, remind them of how much they could achieve, and encourage them to embark on the road to creating lasting change.

Inspiring young leaders

The campaign emphasised the role that young people play in affecting change. Using role models including teen Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, 13-year-old Canadian water activist Autumn Peltier, and 17-year-old female education activist and Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, the campaign showed how real young people are creating dramatic change in the world. Then, it invited young readers to become the generation that saves the planet.

To make the campaign a success, Dainik Jagran looked at the specific traits of this generation and found that they are:

• More upfront about their responses to the adult world, which they mostly reject.
• Comfortable with inventing their own system of codes, values, and mores.
• More self-aware, compassionate, and committed.

The campaign provided Dainik Jagran with an opportunity to accelerate the young people’s desire to create change. It also let the company be recognised by the next generation as a newspaper that was committed to socially desirable goals. Dainik Jagran launched the campaign on a massive scale with a goal of “total immersion,” providing content in print, audio, video, and live formats.

Reaching Generation Now

To be sure the message was getting into the hands, hearts, and ears of young people, Dainik Jagran worked with schools in addition to including stories within the newspaper. School principals worked with the newspaper to finalise the content and then incorporate it into their curriculum.

The content emphasised that today’s young people are our best hope for the future, covering a vast number of topics critical to creating a happier, healthier future. From water conservation to responsible use of technology to practicing sensitivity to animals, the topics were covered extensively with a total of 1,093 stories.

The campaign also included nine animated films, which explained some of these same topics to younger children. All the stories were then converted into audio content, so they could be heard in addition to being read or watched. The stories also were converted into comic book form, with 7,560 comic books placed in 1,000 school libraries.

Topics from the campaign also became the inspiration for debates on moral dilemmas. In just two weeks, some 1,410 students from 521 schools participated in 649 debates in 30 different cities — the largest debate the country had seen on such topics.

Inspiring change

The campaign’s success could be measured in many ways. But one mark of its effectiveness comes in the reaction of the nearly 300 children who took on peer-to-peer education projects, taking the content from the Sanskarshala campaign and sharing it with 30,996 underprivileged children. They found unique, creative ways to share that message, including street theatre, and the stories also were taken to more than 3,500 special needs children in 200+ schools.

In all, more than 2 million children participated directly in Sanskarshala initiatives, and the campaign as a whole reached 70 million Dainik Jagran readers. Video views on Facebook and YouTube also surpassed 1 million, and the animated films were shared in 727 hyper-local Whatsapp groups.

With this campaign, Dainik Jagran established today’s young people as the generation that could save the future while establishing itself as a media company that wants to lead them into that future.

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