Harry Tattersall Smith

May 31st, 2013 - 2 mins read

Here at Harkable Towers we are in the process of doing some really exciting charity work with Miracles on their brilliant 50 Children 50 Artists campaign.

We’ll have more details about that on the blog soon, but the work got us thinking about some of the finest social media campaigns used by charities.

An excellent campaign from Refuge which mirrors a traditional YouTube tutorial video for applying make up- only here it’s for covering up the injuries of domestic abuse. The video, part of Refuge ‘s ‘Don’t Cover It Up’ campaign, was launched through the YouTube account of Vlogger Lauren Luke, to her 444,000 subscribers. Using Luke, herself a victim of abuse, was a key part of the campaigns success as it allowed Refuge to target their key audience : young women.

Hijacking a hashtag is always risky but Water is Life executed it superbly. Their campaign saw victims of the Haiti Earthquake read out tweets featuring the popular, self-deprecatingly, comic hashtag through which western users make light of their superfifical problems.

An app that delves into the deepest crevices of your Facebook and churns through your actions, friendships, likes and thoughts from the Social Media platform to reveal in which countries of the world you’d be deemed a criminal. It highlights the gruesome punishments that would await you in some of the most repressive countries for committing every day acts of freedom which we in the western world take for granted.

Get yourself sentenced here.

A campaign that scathingly attacks ‘slacktivists’; People who lazily click to like a charity campaign to bask in the appearance of philanthropy but who never actually donate or invest any time or money to the cause.

A viral movement launched in 2010 which sought to address the issue of the growing teenage gay and lesbian suicide rate. The videos gives LGBT adults a platform to tell young people of all sexuality’s that however tough life is, that things will only get better.The campaign has spawned over 50,000 user “It Gets Better” created videos on YouTube which together have racked up a combined total of over 50 million views.

Here’s just one example from the University of Glasgow.