The American University in Dubai Students Give Back in Ramadan TikTok Takeover

The Ramadan Period is known to be all about selflessness, love, sharing and giving back to the community.

This year, TheCreative9 agency in Dubai, decided to give client The American University in Dubai some love by approaching them with an initiative created in line with the Ramadan spirit and that promotes kindness.

“The extra mile for a smile, a digital-lead campaign, took place on the American University in Dubai campus, and offered students the power of making others smile using a platform they love to engage with, TikTok.

This project was brought to life by a TikTok challenge pushing students to perform random acts of kindness, such as feeding stray cats, sending out sweet messages randomly, or calling a friend to show appreciation. 

The results were endearing, fun and unexpectedly amusing.

Rola Ghotmeh, chief creative officer of TheCreative9, explains that the TikTok campaign's goal was to promote a sense of community on campus and off of it by encouraging students to take genuine and relatable actions. 

She said, “We see the university as an educational platform that goes beyond academia. This campaign lives true to the brand’s promise of “get life ready” by getting our students ready to take on life post-university in the best shape possible, with both, their soft and hard skills.”

She added, "The best way to teach kindness is to give it and receive it, and that was the aim of this initiative. We wanted to make kindness contagious, by encouraging our students to spread it in fun, engaging and relatable ways on an app that is native to them.”

TikTok was the perfect tool to reach this generation because of its high shareability ratio and Ramadan was the perfect timing.

During Ramadan 2022 people were spending over an hour on TikTok every day! In The American University in Dubai’s case, we had a golden opportunity to leverage user-generated content for a good cause during the holy month. 

The team at TheCreative9 involved the social media executives and were guided by Yasmina Rajab, communications manager at TheCreative9, who added, “The TikTok workshop we attended earlier this year with the agency helped us understand the importance of careful planning and social listening which propelled the success of this initiative. Through this campaign, we were able to make a difference, even by the smallest acts of kindness, which inspired a ripple effect on campus and on TikTok!”

And indeed, kindness was a hit!

These heart-warming pieces resulted in a 4K followers increase, and the videos have garnered 1.1M impressions, 389K reach and more than 300K video views that boosted the page’s engagement rates. 

Even though the Ramadan period was a great starting point for our 'Extra mile for a smile' campaign, creating a kinder community is something that should last all year long, regardless of the period, the month or the holiday season, because what this initiative showed us is that small acts of kindness can have the biggest impact.