Until now, 14.085 unique sponsors have received a message from their sponsor child. That really is worth a huge compliment to you, our partner organisation! The COVID-19 pandemic has made our work more difficult, but nevertheless you succeeded in sending 14.876 greeting letters, 7.291 progress reports and 3376 thank you letters to the sponsors. Amazing!

New initiatives

Digitized letters of sponsor children
During lockdown, sending written letters was not always an option. This speeded up our ambition to digitize the sponsorship program. As a result, we started sending scanned copies of Greeting letters and Thank You letters. The picture shows a digitized Thank You letter.

Thank you letters to sponsors are also available offline via the Kobo toolbox: https://ee.kobotoolbox.org/x/FtwkcoeF

Personal videos
Together with our partner organizations DEDRAS Benin and Conviventia Colombia we started a pilot to further digitize the sponsorship program. Those 2 partners selected a group of children to do this pilot with. From those children a short video message will be recorded for their sponsors. In the coming months we will further evaluate this pilot. Early next year we’ll decide how to continue with this new initiatives for all other partner organizations. In 2021 we aim to replace (a part of) the second Greeting letter by a personal video in every sponsorship country.

Christmas greeting 2020
This year, the Christmas greetings will be scanned and sent digitally. Looking for some inspiration? Make a Christmas bell!

Greetings 2021

• The first Greeting letter of 2021 will be the same as you are used to: you can send a hardcopy of the written letter to Woord en Daad.
• The second Greeting letter will (partly) be replaced by a personal video of the sponsor child.
• There won’t be any changes with sending pictures.
• The progress report also won’t change for now.

We are looking forward to take some steps forward in digitizing the sponsorship program, but we are also aware that these new initiatives means a new way of working for our partner organisations. So please let us know if you have any concerns, or if you want to share a best practice! Send an email to Annelien Bom: a.bom@woordendaad.nl.