MONDAY 3 SEP 2012 2:09 PM

UNICEF LAUNCHES PINTEREST CAMPAIGN TO RAISE AWARENESS

UNICEF, the UN’s children’s advocacy branch, announced that it will launch a campaign on Pinterest with partner Weapon7, a digital design agency, on 4 September. The ‘Pinning their hopes’ campaign seeks to raise awareness among the social networking site’s young users and to encourage donations.

The new initiative will feature images of the luxury goods that populate Pinterest’s boards alongside images of things the world’s poorest children aspire to, such as food and clean drinking water. This will engage users with the issue of children’s poverty through a medium that encourages aspirational lifestyles.

UNICEF’s head of digital engagement said the Weapon7 idea provided the organisation with a way to use Pinterest to engage people with the issues surrounding child poverty.

“This campaign is not just about making child poverty more visible; it’s also about helping people to see it clearly,” Jeremy Garner, executive creative director at Weapon7, says. “By running this campaign in an unfamiliar medium we hope to really make people wake up to child poverty, and take an action, whether it be spreading the word or making a donation.”

UNICEF, which has been successful in its use of Facebook to engage social media users, already has 4,661 followers on Pinterest. Pinterest is the third most-used social media site in the United States and has been swiftly gaining traction in the UK and elsewhere since it opened registration to all users last month.

To read more about Pinterest, click here.