Three Donors Forum awards go to Czech Radio

“The award-winning projects have managed to help concrete people and organisations. Social responsibility has long been one of the basic pillars of Czech Radio’s philosophy,” stated the General Director of Czech Radio, René Zavoral. 

Second place in the Public Benefit Ad category belongs to the Blind Fan project. The ads are comprised of a montage of commented sports broadcasts for visually impaired fans, which began in 2018 with football and continued this year with hockey, basketball and tennis. The documentary spots capture not only the action on the playing fields, but also the reaction of the blind participants and point to the specific nature of commentary for these games, where the commentator describes the action in the game and in the stands, but spends much more time noting, for example, the gesticulations and descriptions of the players. The video ads were realised through the efforts of the Světluška foundation and the Czech Radio station Radiožurnál to make sporting activities more accessible for the blind.

Rebranding Světluška got second place in the Integrated Campaign category. The foundation came with a striking change to its visual style for the first time since its inception. The new logo is supplemented with the claim “Shining in the dark” (“Svítíme ve tmě”) and a mascot in the form of a comic-book beetle, which is the connecting element to the current graphic form of Světluška. With its new form, the Světluška fundraising project is trying to be, among other things, attractive and decipherable for the younger generation, to motivate and to draw into the action and inspire to philonthropic activities with the tale of the genesis of the new logo. Světluška has been characterised by the organisation of events that have, for years, been connected with the colour black. A change is coming here, too. The new visual form of Světluška is bright, colourful and brings joy and a positive mood, because giving and helping others are about joy and mutual solidarity.

The third award for Czech Radio in the form of third place in the Fundraising Project category went to the cycling road show, Riding for Světluška. Over the course of August, twelve people from Czech Radio, including moderators, reporters and an editor-in-chief, took turns on a tandem bike over twelve stages throughout the entire Czech Republic. One member of the crew was always a visually-impaired cyclist and the destination was a place where Světluška helps. They rode, for example, to a camp for visually-impaired children, to a self-defense class for the blind and to a theatre that was planning an extraordinary performance for the blind. The Czech Radio station Radiožurnál broadcast three entries from each of the trips and one report in which it involved both the visually-impaired cyclist and the activities of the visited organisation and a theme from the life of the visually impaired.

“I would like to remind people that Czech Radio is the benefactor of the Czech Radio Foundation Fund, which will be celebrating its 20^th anniversary next year. Czech Radio was also at the birth of the project and public collection Světluška. I personally perceive us as connected vessels that mutually enrich each other with their contents. That is one of the reasons why three wonderful projects originated this year, in cooperation with the moderators and editors of Radiožurnál and other Czech Radio stations and the Czech Radio Graphic Studio. Today all three received Donors Forum awards,” stated the Director of the Czech Radio Foundation Fund, Gabriela Drastichová.