Amnesty International has been using online petitions to get people's support for years.

In order to encourage more people to take part, we had to find an impactful low-cost way to bring the online petitions to their attention. We built upon an existing web convention: the captcha, the little forms that test if a user is human usually by typing in distorted letters.

We created a new captcha format, where people can sign an online petition as a means to prove their humanity.

Amnesty Captcha is one of those rare cases where medium becomes a big part of the message. The idea manifests as a media innovation, the use of an existing convention in a new way to pass a relevant message.

The effort from the media team went to spread the usage of the tool among webmasters, bloggers and popular web services in corporation with Amnesty International. This mainly happened via emailing, phone calls and word of mouth.

Residents of Warsaw have been counting their “prison time”.

Amnesty International collected a few thousand Zlotys thanks to donations for prisoners mentioned in the campaign.

People in another city (Gdansk) got inspired by this calendar and created its own mural.

The idea gained a great appreciation in other Amnesty International offices abroad. They adapted this idea and planned to create similar mural-calendars for 2014.

Dozens of Polish media informed the public about Empathy Calendar and this issue was discussed on many blogs and websites.