How Karmarama Turned the SDGs Into the World's To-Do List

Why the SDGs Needed a New Narrative in the 2021 US Market

Project Everyone was founded around the 2015 launch of the Sustainable Development Goals with the explicit objective of taking the Goals out of UN documents and placing them into public culture, according to project-everyone.org. Six years later, with the 2030 deadline approaching and pandemic-era disruption having set back progress across multiple goals, the organisation faced a renewed urgency: the SDGs remained widely unknown among general populations despite being the organising framework for global development policy.

The strategic insight behind The World's To-Do List was structural. Abstract policy frameworks do not motivate individual action; familiar, personal formats do. A to-do list carries intrinsic psychological weight — it implies tasks that are unfinished, achievable, and personally accountable. By recasting the 17 Global Goals in this format, Karmarama shifted the audience's relationship to the SDGs from spectator to participant. The campaign arrived at a moment when nonprofit digital advertising was growing rapidly: nonprofit digital advertising investment increased by approximately 19% in 2021, according to 2022 Mrbenchmarks, reflecting a broader shift in how public interest organisations were reaching audiences in the United States and elsewhere.

In a crowded public service landscape, The World's To-Do List competed for attention against long-running institutional campaigns from organisations such as the United Nations Development Programme, whose own communications efforts in the United States targeted similar civically engaged audiences, as well as purpose-driven brand platforms from major advertisers increasingly occupying the same cultural space. The campaign's decision to recruit thirteen named corporate partners, each with significant employee bases and social media audiences, reflected a distribution strategy designed to bypass traditional paid media dependency and instead leverage organisational reach as a multiplier.

Giant Sticky Notes and Documentary Craft Inside the Karmarama Production

The World's To-Do List takes a documentary-social experiment form, using the physical act of placing oversized sticky notes bearing the 17 SDGs onto real-world surfaces and landmarks as its primary creative device. The film records public and corporate reactions to this intervention, generating an unscripted quality that grounds the campaign's aspirational message in observable human response. As reported by LBBOnline on 21 September 2021, the campaign used giant sticky notes across landmarks and digital channels to present the 17 SDGs as an accessible to-do list, a description that captures the campaign's dual operation in physical and digital space simultaneously.

The film was directed by Ludo Fealy, produced through production company Nineteen Twenty, with colour grade by Kai Van Beers, 2D artistry by Jamie Stitson, production by Isabella Hunt-Davis, and post-production by Ondrej Faltin. Sound was handled by 750 mph, with sound engineers Mike Bovill and Michalis Anthis. At the agency level, Executive Creative Director Adam Kean led the creative direction, with the creative team formed by Rachel Holding and Dan Leppanen. Karmarama CEO Ben Bilboul, Business Lead Eilidh McGregor, Account Director Sophie Jackson, and Senior Planner Max Richards completed the core agency team, alongside TV Producer Carol Oakley and Creative Producer Christina Lambrou.

Communicate Magazine described the film's approach on 22 September 2021 as grounded in the idea that the 17 Goals, made visible at human scale, could prompt genuine public engagement rather than institutional distance. The campaign's visual language — handwritten, temporary, adhesive — deliberately contradicted the permanence and abstraction of policy documents, creating a contrast that gave the film its emotional register. The production achieves a tone that sits between civic urgency and accessible optimism, a balance that is consistently difficult to strike in public interest filmmaking.

Measuring the Reach of The World's To-Do List Beyond the UN General Assembly

The World's To-Do List generated more than 7 million views for its campaign film, according to project-everyone.org. Project Everyone's own impact reporting claimed 23 million engagements and 215,000 social media interactions across the campaign's lifecycle, per project-everyone.org. These figures reflect the amplification effect of the thirteen participating corporate partners, whose combined social media reach exceeded 100 million, as reported by project-everyone.org, and whose employee bases of more than 700,000 people served as an internal distribution network in the United States and internationally.

No independently audited third-party performance data for The World's To-Do List is publicly available beyond the figures disclosed by Project Everyone. The structural mechanics of the campaign, however, offer a clear basis for assessing effectiveness. The combination of a precisely timed launch during the UN General Assembly, a memorable and transferable visual format, a direct-action URL, and a pre-committed coalition of corporate amplifiers represents a distribution architecture that many public service campaigns lack. The campaign's lineage also matters: Project Everyone's 2015 Tell Everyone campaign, which rebranded the SDGs as The Global Goals for mass audiences and whose 2015 Global Citizen Festival launch activity was attended by approximately 60,000 people according to project-everyone.org, established an audience and a creative identity that The World's To-Do List could build on rather than construct from scratch. The Clapboard Score of 72 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its core idea with clarity and strategic discipline, anchored by verifiable reach but without the independently verified outcome data that would place it in a higher tier.