Last week, just as TOMS Shoes began enabling socially conscious shoppers to make an impact — for free — through its One Day Without Shoes campaign, WWF launched its first ever emoji-based crowdfunding campaign to help support the organization’s work to protect endangered species and their habitats.
#EndangeredEmoji will run through the official @WWF Twitter account and at http://endangeredemoji.com. Here’s how it works:
- WWF will tweet an image showing all 17 Endangered Emoji. To take part in the campaign all Twitter users need to do is retweet the image.
- For every Endangered Emoji the user then tweets, WWF will add the local currency equivalent of €0.10 to a voluntary monthly donation.
- At the end of each month, users will receive a summary of their Endangered Emoji use and can then choose how much to donate.
Adrian Cockle, Digital Innovation Manager at WWF International, said: “When it comes to fundraising, giving people a simple way to donate is key. By using one of the world’s biggest social platforms to highlight endangered species, we’re hoping to raise vital funds for their conservation as well as raising awareness globally.”
With the realization that 17 characters in the emoji alphabet represent endangered species, WWF thought to translate the popularity of these characters into donations. Emoji have been used over 202 million times on Twitter since they were integrated into the platform in April 2014, according to Emoji Tracker, and the number is increasing daily.
The emoji alphabet, the standardized set of digital pictograph characters used in communication globally, contain the following characters that represent endangered species:
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Speaking of bluefin tuna, last summer at the Inter American Tropical Tuna Commission meeting in Lima, Peru, WWF pleaded with the two Regional Fisheries Management Organizations covering the Pacific to cut their catch limits in half to enable the long-term sustainability of the Pacific Bluefin Tuna fishery.