The International Red Cross is an organization with approximately 100 million volunteers focusing on humanitarian efforts to protect human life and alleviate human suffering. The committee is located in over 90 countries all over the world to focus their efforts locally and work collectively to attain their mission.
Every year, the Hong Kong Red Cross holds a Flag Day, where thousands of volunteers are mobilized as flag sellers with a goal to raise funds for their humanitarian efforts. This Flag Day is an opportunity for the Hong Kong Red Cross to spread awareness of its mission and attract more volunteers to join.
The challenge of this campaign was to harness the power of social media to broadcast details about the event and spread information about the great work done by the Red Cross society. What was the most effective way to spread awareness about the event and combine this with the efforts taken up by organizations across the globe? How would volunteers learn about the impact of their efforts? These are some of the challenges that the DSIGN team had to tackle during this project.
1. Global Focus
The Red Cross is present in countries all over the world. They are assisted by volunteers from different cultural backgrounds. Each nation-state has its characteristics, like the savannahs and wildlife of Africa, the monuments in Europe, or the White House and Capitol building in the USA. The DSIGN team wanted to cater the visuals to volunteers from all parts of the world. The inspiration came from EarthTV where cameras around the world feature famous landmarks. We combined this idea with the efforts of humanitarianism to visualise the diverse reach of the World Red Cross. We believe the campaign could strongly resonate with the local audience who are familiar with Earth Live, a local weather show. The play on words and appealing graphics of the campaign helped to catch the viewer’s attention to the program to find out more about the activities.2. Personalised Approach
Facebook is very popular in Hong Kong, with a penetration rate of over 83%, it is one of the most widely used social media platforms in the country. Facebook allows the Hong Kong Red Cross to reach a wide target audience base and allows us to interact and respond to the viewers. DSIGN leveraged this penetration and reach to design Facebook visuals that would bring more information about the Red Cross to the community at this event. We created attractive and colourful designs that would capture the attention of those visiting the Facebook page. The promotion of Flag Day activities was combined with visuals of different states of the world in line with the theme of Red Cross-border. We decided to narrow down the theme to showcase upcoming humanitarian activities as a way to help others. Each post was focused on a different continent and we used inspiring quotes as taglines to motivate volunteers to join the efforts. To increase the credibility of the society, each post mentioned the number of countries in each continent in which the Red Cross is present.3. Information Balance
It is a well-known fact that we retain very little of what we read. By some estimates, we are able to retain less than 10% of what we read the first time. The nature of social media content is often read just once, which is why good visuals are very important to make the content memorable. Since the Facebook design visuals needed to encompass two aspects – the mission of the Red Cross and information about Flag Day, we worked hard to balance our message appropriately. The DSIGN team avoided putting too much attention on only one of them, either the Flag Day or World Red Cross information. Too much information about one over the other would lead to too many points and this would make it difficult to convey our key message. The graphics were used to convey this idea and make the post more visually appealing which aligned with the overall design.Conclusion
Through our visuals and execution, we were able to reach out to hundreds of new volunteers and spread information about the World Red Cross. A key takeaway from this campaign is that it is important to strike a balance between too much and too little information in order to spread the desired message effectively.