Funding a School Through Retail

Ramadan 2025 CSR campaign, P&G Morocco. Purchases across eleven participating brands paid for the rehabilitation of a century-old boarding school.

At a glance

• Role: Brand Operations Manager and owner of Modern Retail Marketing Operations, P&G Morocco
• Scope: concept to execution, then the warehouse at the end
• Brands: 11
• Result: a boarding school rehabilitated in full, funded by tens of thousands of dollars in purchase-linked contributions, and an inauguration to close it

I joined P&G Morocco in December 2024. By Ramadan 1446 (2025), I owned the retail side of one of the company’s main events of the year: Nsaedou lghir fi chhar lkhir (“Let’s help others in the month of goodness”). The idea was to turn a shopper’s purchase into something solid, so when people bought participating brands, they helped fund the rehabilitation of a century-old boarding school. The display kept the deal simple: 20% of each purchase of participating products went toward restoring a school in a rural area.

I carried the campaign from the first concept to the last display back in the warehouse. Eleven brands took part, so I worked with each of their Brand Managers, and alongside them with Sales, Legal, PR, Finance, Purchasing, Store Development, our agencies and the partner organizations. Every display, wobbler and poster had to arrive and go up on schedule, so the work came down to handoffs: who delivers what, to whom, and by when.

Working next to PR then taught me something I had not considered before. A brand can stand in a supermarket aisle and say it cares, but people believe it when the claim points to something they can see. The rehabilitation gave us exactly that. Because the contribution became a finished school, our communication did not have to promise impact. It could show it.

In the end, purchases across eleven brands added up to tens of thousands of dollars, more than $30,000 in all, and that money rehabilitated the entire school. It closed with an inauguration. In global-goal terms, that serves Quality Education (SDG 4), since the money restored a place where children learn and live, and Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11), since it preserved a century-old community institution instead of replacing it.

At the inauguration, I talked with some of the students. I asked what they wanted to become, and I expected answers as big as my questions. Instead, what I heard stayed closer to what they saw around them every day. That surprised me at first. Then it made me curious, because the surprise said more about my assumptions than about them: I had assumed that every child imagines a future far beyond the place they grow up in.

That made me ask how much a child’s surroundings decide how big a future that child can imagine. A school does more than teach. It can widen what feels possible.

The conversation also changed how I think about activation work. A display lasts a few weeks, a poster comes down, and a campaign ends. But a school keeps serving children long after the last piece of point-of-sale material has gone back to the warehouse.

So I took two things from it. Corporate impact needs substance first and a story second. And the figures became real to me only when I met the students they served.

Looking back as a communication student

Today I would ask two questions about a campaign like this. In cause-linked marketing, which researchers call cause-related marketing, does a finished outcome earn more trust than an announced pledge? And how do you measure what a project changes for the people it serves, beyond how shoppers respond? I did not ask them then. I ask them now.