The NSPCA (National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) is a non-profit organisation in South Africa that aims to prevent cruelty, promote kindness and alleviate the suffering of animals. Our brief was to generate some much-needed donations for them and make people aware that they care for all animals – not just cats and dog.

Animals Do What? is a social media campaign that doesn’t use sad kittens to get people to donate but rather celebrates animals in all their glory by pointing out all the amazing things they do for us humans.

Like did you know jellyfish have inspired a device that can capture cancer cells right out our bloodstream? Or that chickens are helping treat people with dementia? We took amazing facts like this and assigned one to each emoji. And not just the animal emojis – every emoji. All 3147 of them.

We then asked people to tweet any emoji to @NSPCA_SA using #AnimalsDoWhat and we sent them a mind-blowing fact back about something amazing an animal does, with a link encouraging them to donate to the NSPCA.

Most animal welfare campaigns use images of sad animals to guilt people into donating. And it’s usually only the animal lovers who end up parting with their cash. So our strategy was to find a way to make all people care about animals – not just the bunny huggers.

It took us 2 and a half years to write and assign these facts to each of the emojis. We then found a very smart developer who wrote a very smart algorithm that would immediately send someone the assigned fact back when they tweeted a certain emoji to @NSPCA_SA using #AnimalsDoWhat. This campaign took place on Twitter and we didn’t just stop at asking people to send us an emoji – we also tweeted hundreds of brands and celebrities, pointing out all the amazing things animals have done for them personally and asked them to repay the favour. We also jumped on trending hashtags (even the local government elections), bringing them all back to something an animal does. And every tweet we sent out, included a link that encouraged people to donate to the NSPCA.

This campaign reached 7.3 million people and generated R4 million in earned media and 2.1 million impressions. But most importantly, it helped people see animals in a whole new light and within the first month it helped increase donations by 400%, which means the NSPCA can keep helping the animals that do so much for us