R/GA says ‘I Go For You’ with new grocery delivery service for SG seniors

Amid the rising number of COVID-19 cases in Singapore, R/GA has launched an initiative that connects seniors who need groceries with people around their neighbourhood who are willing and able to help. Called ‘I Go For You’ / ‘让我来’, the initiative aims to help protect the elderly from the infectious disease by encouraging them to stay at home while young and well-abled members of the community help with their marketing and essential errands. 

‘I Go For You’ will be accessible to all seniors, especially non-English speakers who want to buy groceries during the circuit breaker. Seniors will be required to call a hotline to make a request in their preferred mother tongue language, and the order will be handed to volunteer shoppers. In this initial launch, the ‘I Go For You’ hotline will operate in Mandarin Chinese, and will roll out with English, Malay, and Tamil in the coming weeks. R/GA leveraged its Smart Design and Technology Center of Excellence with the Singapore Economic Board of Singapore to create this service and ensure innovation was applied agnostic of age group and digital savviness. 

In a statement to Marketing, Dorothy Peng, managing director, R/GA Singapore said on top of existing client work and ongoing pitches, the agency took less than two weeks from ideation to release of the initiative. According to Peng, the agency was inspired to create and build a service that would make a difference to the future of humanity in Singapore, and speed was an important factor as every day COVID-19 was affecting lives in many ways. 

She explained that the team faced some challenges while working on the initiative. These include deciding which features would go live first and which ones would be iteratively done after launch, as well as to keep the tech infrastructure simple and move at speed to launch. Currently, R/GA is utilising Google Spreadsheets as the database and Twilio as the phone conversation system, and aims to refine the service in real-time based on feedback from users.

“Covid-19 has impacted lives in many ways unimaginable before. We wanted to make a difference to the community we live in and to demonstrate real impact. The future of humanity is what drives us as a group of thinkers and makers, so we wanted to create something that helps one of the most vulnerable groups in the community.  With ‘I Go For You’, we hope this initiative brings people together to help senior citizens in their communities stay safe by staying at home,” Peng added. 

Meanwhile, Yaacob Ibrahim, Member of Parliament, ex-Minister for Communication and Information, and advisor to SIT, lauded R/GA for this community service, adding: “I welcome this initiative as it will certainly help our vulnerable seniors to stay safe. This is a good application of technology that will improve the quality of life for our seniors."

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Similarly, The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) launched a Tekka Online Market initiative to equip Singaporeans, including vulnerable seniors, with the digital know-how to shop for their groceries online without physically heading to the market. Done in collaboration with Max Kee of Lian Huat Seafood and creative agency BLKJ, the project looked to create a new kind of relevance for the digital lifestyle by mashing up the wet market with the digital world.

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