Can social media be used to tackle sensitive issues?

Can social media be used to tackle sensitive issues? This was the question we asked ourselves when working with The Children’s Society in the UK on a campaign to protect the 100,000 children who run away from home every year.

The charity has a particularly strong Facebook fan base, and we wanted to take The Children’s Society’s message to where its fans were. Our challenge was to find a way to get their Facebook fans talking and learning about the emotionally serious issue of runaway children, without trivialising the subject or being disrespectful to children or to the organization.

We realised we could make use of people’s fondness for Facebook quizzes by using a Q&A framework to drive empathy for the young people who run away: our quiz would invite supporters to put themselves in a runaway’s shoes and reflect on the experience.

Thus, 13-year-old runaway “Amber” was born. We developed an illustrated quiz for Facebook, which walked quiz-takers through a virtual journey with Amber, inviting them to contemplate the dilemmas she encounters and choose how to respond. Though fictional, the story we created for Amber was based wholly on the real words and experiences of young people who had shared their personal stories with The Children’s Society. To increase the number of Facebook fans for the charity, quiz-takers were asked at the end of their journey to post the quiz to their wall, inviting others to participate.

We knew that the success of this endeavour would ultimately depend on striking the right tone with the quiz materials, so we turned to BSD’s in-house animator, Andy Zimbelman, to create the illustrations that would guide users through the quiz. Andy outlines his thought process:

"My initial challenge was deciding how to represent the subject matter without being overly dramatic, maudlin, or exploitative. The process started with loose thumbnail explorations in my sketchbook. I was able to plot out Amber’s design as a character and the parts of her narrative I wanted to depict:

I chose to focus on Amber at the moments when traumatic events are happening to her - critical moments when she has to fight to decide what to do and where to go. Roads, doorways and windows thus became important visual devices to draw attention to her internal struggle:

I then began illustrating digitally. I drew basic shapes and layers, which were then imported into Photoshop for additional lighting and texturing:

The last step was to use After Effects for final color correcting and finessing:

One of the best parts of our work at BSD is being able to work on pieces like this, with such depth and social significance. I feel very fortunate not only to have been able to explore this artistically but also to have worked with a great client fighting for such a worthwhile cause.

 Check out Andy’s work and try The Children’s Society’s runaways Facebook quiz for yourself: