In 2012, the UN briefed us to create global awareness for World Humanitarian Day and help shine a light on the importance of aid work. To achieve this incredibly ambitious task with minimal budget required us to focus on developing an idea that could translate with ease across borders and languages. The target market provided us with one small challenge; we had to reach the world.

Partnering with Beyoncé, we turned her song into a message that would inspire people to do something good, somewhere, for someone else, to say ‘I Was Here’.

The campaign was driven by our new social media platform ‘Thunderclap’, bringing together the support of people from all over the world, including Michelle Obama, Oprah, Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber.

We set ourselves a target of reaching 1 billion people and on August 19 World Humanitarian Day, we released all the messages as one voice.

People were able to donate their social media following through a new ‘crowdspeaking’ platform called Thunderclap. Rallying support for social causes, Thunderclap orchestrates and amplifies a message through the simultaneous broadcast to the followers or friends of those who sign-up.

A campaign website with social media integration allowed supporters to join, tag involvement, like, follow, share their involvement and watch a live tracker of the billion target, ensuring we hit the necessary charity motivator cues.

PSAs featuring Ban Ki-Moon and Beyonce, online banners, posters and a music video extended the campaign’s reach.

An exclusive WHD event was filmed inside the UN General Assembly, including a live performance of ‘I Was Here’ by Beyoncé to an audience of local community members and UN dignitaries.

The film was released online and screened at events in over 30 countries and #WHD2012 became a worldwide trending topic on Twitter.

Over 1.033 billion messages of support were broadcast across Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter streams globally.

NGOs around the world celebrated with real WHD events, including a video projection onto the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, an SMS broadcast across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and live video events in cinemas throughout Pakistan.

Beyoncé’s performance received over 6.5 million views on YouTube, 340,000 shares, 100,000 Facebook likes and thousands of views on China’s Weibo network.

The audacity of the billion-person target captured the attention of the world’s media, generating an estimated audience of over 2.5 billion people. 950 news outlets and over 3,500 different articles fueled mainstream awareness, including Anderson Cooper 360 (CNN), Entertainment Tonight (CBS), MTV, US Today Show, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Fox News, Mashable, Fast Company, Forbes, and The Guardian.

And importantly, thousands of individuals shared acts of goodwill on the website.