CalenDARE Against Plastic

Every year, sometime in November, agencies across Armenia receive very similar briefs – design year-end corporate calendars for different brands. Our brief from ACBA-CREDIT AGRICOLE BANK, one of the country’s leading banks, was no exception. But while paper calendars used to be rather valuable in the beginning of the decade, by now they have simply become obsolete. So, how do you make a calendar that people will not only use, but also talk about and even take selfies with? Paper calendars are not just unnecessary. They also waste a lot of paper and are quite harmful to the environment. Rather than ignore this issue, we challenged ourselves to create a calendar that would tackle the very problem that paper calendars represent – waste of resources and danger to nature. To do this, we drew inspiration from ACBA-CREDIT AGRICOLE BANK’s CSR mission – to protect Armenia’s natural environment. Instead of designing another ordinary calendar, we created the CalenDARE Against Plastic – a calendar composed of 4 eco bags made with recycled paper. 12 000 CalenDAREs were given out to bank clients across Armenia and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Despite the poor awareness about the issue of plastic bags and plastic pollution in the country, people quickly took to social media to discuss the innovative calendar and the issue it raises. To further promote the CalenDare, a social media campaign (including a video ad, publications on Facebook and Instagram and influencer marketing) was carried out. Designing 4 paper bags that fold into a calendar was quite a challenge. To make sure that more organizations could benefit from our efforts, we decided to make the printing file public, so that anyone could easily reproduce the CalenDare. We created a landing page and placed the full printing file online, as an open source document.