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Vodacom Millionaires
Story:
PAULA Carvalho-Malekane is the person responsible, each week, for giving away hundreds of thousands, often millions, of rands.
Most of Paula’s time is taken up with the Vodacom Millionaires TV programme and competition. The loyalty promotion has been a phenomenal success ever since its launch five years ago. Every Tuesday evening almost 8 million people in South Africa tune in to their TV to see whether they’ve won a prize. In the past five years, 3.5 million of them have won: cash, cars, cellphones and airtime; prizes worth a staggering R164 million in total. Almost every week a prize of at least R200 000 is given away to one lucky winner.
All Vodacom customers, whether they are on prepaid, top-up or contract, get two free SMS entries to each week’s competition. They choose nine letters and these are matched against nine letters drawn randomly by a computer. In 2010 weekly entries reached 3.5 million, an increase of almost a million on the previous year. Since its inception Vodacom Millionaires (previously known as “Yebo Millionaires”) has made 27 millionaires – in the last year there were no fewer than eight R1 million winners.
Customers can also pay R1 per additional SMS entry. The cost of these entries is used to give a deserving school a fully equipped computer centre worth R120 000 every week – 48 schools a year.
The most rewarding part of her job, says Paula, is interacting with the winners. Vodacom doesn’t simply write out cheques to the lucky entrants. Most winners are poor, often almost destitute, and the sudden arrival of a very large sum of money changes their lives. Paula and her team do everything they can to make sure it is a change for the better.
“We spend at least three days with each winner (of R200 000 or more),” says Paula. “Often we have to help people to open bank accounts and we put them in touch with financial advisors who help them make the right decisions, to invest the money wisely.”
Vodacom Millionaires winners, says Paula, are all “such incredibly nice, good people. They will often be living in a shack but the shack will be spotlessly clean. And when we go to visit them they will slaughter their last chicken in our honour. It is very humbling to meet these people, to experience the great decency and kindness that there is all over the country.”
Paula recalls one winner who entered the letters ‘THANK U LOR’. “I asked her how she came to choose those letters. She said she wanted to say thank you to God. She had lost a child but, whatever happened, she was grateful to the Lord for all she had. And then she won on Vodacom Millionaires.”
Paula recalls another winner, of R50 000, who told her that she used her winnings to go back to school. She had since qualified as a teacher and is now supporting her whole family. One winner of R1 million had been working as a domestic worker in Tzaneen for R500 a month.
Winners often keep in touch with Paula and her team afterwards. A Cape Town winner, for instance, used some of his prize to start a crayfish retail business. “Whenever he’s in Johannesburg he pops in to drop off some crayfish for me,” smiles Paula.
It’s Paula’s responsibility to phone the winners to tell them that they’ve won. “Often people put the phone down on me; they think I’m playing a trick on them,” she says. “It takes more than one call to convince them. Most times people start crying when the truth slowly sinks in.”
Paula also gets to visit the schools that have won computer centres worth R120 000 each or R480 000 in total every month. Each school gets 20 laptops, a big-screen TV, printers, ink cartridges and training and, from early 2011, four Vodafone WebBoxes per school. Most schools make the centres available to the community so that not only the children benefit.
Paula cites the example of the Mhlwazi Junior Secondary School near Elliot in the Eastern Cape. A deeply rural community, the children “looked terribly cold and hungry when we visited”, says Paula, and the school had no electricity. But the principal insisted that the computer centre get straight up and running so she raised funds for the school to get solar power. “She was determined, as she said, that her children should dream big,” says Paula.
“People are all so amazingly grateful and they all take our advice very seriously. We make many, many friends through Vodacom Millionaires. I think you will agree with me when I say I have the very best job at Vodacom.”