“Swap your face with a missing child’s face and send snaps to you friends.”

At the end of April Snapchat enabled the face swap option. This inspired our team. We created the SNAP&SEEK tool based on the mobile web page snap.zaginieni.pl (Snapchat works only on mobile devices) from which photos of missing teenagers could be downloaded to any phone. Then, using swap-face function in app, user could swap their face with that of the missing person and send snaps to their friends.

In this way, all Snapchat users (and virtually most of them are teenagers) could easily engage in a cool undertaking, inviting their followers to join as well.

It all started on May 25th – The International Missing Children’s Day. First well known Snapchat celebrities swapped their faces with missing children and added videos to their Stories. Then ITAKA shared a video, where our celebrities promoted Snap&Seek. All activations led to SNAP.ZAGINIENI.PL – site from which you could download missing child’s photo to spread the message on your Snapchat story.

Snapchat users were very eager to participate. Photos of missing people could be seen in many user 'stories' and well known tech and innovation opinion leaders prompted the idea. Later on people shared screenshots from Snapchat on other social media platforms. Some “standard” media also shared the news.

Important notice: Snap&Seek is not a one-time campaign. It has become a habit that ITAKA keeps using today. The campaign’s website is constantly being updated with new photos of “new” missing children.

About one third of all Polish Snapchat users (300 000) engaged in the Snap&Seek campaign (by watching or sharing their own stories on Snapchat). We’ve also reached over 1 million users from other social media channels. For ITAKA Snap&Seek was a historical step as it engaged an enormous number of young people in looking for missing teenagers – as nothing before.

Although some of the missing teenagers were found, we do not report it as the campaign's outcome. It is impossible to say for sure that a given person was found thanks to Snap&Seek and not other actions undertaken by ITAKA.