“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 from photos saved on your phone. This inspired our team. We created "SNAP&SEEK" based on the mobile web page snap.zaginieni.pl, 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.

In April and May 2016, Snapchat was thriving in Poland. According to the estimates, over 900,000 people use it, mostly teenagers. Hence, it was the perfect medium to use in a campaign.

Our goal was to engage teenagers in search for the missing peers, with creating a "cool", relevant and easy to use (for them) mechanics.

As face-swap distorts photos and you can't tell how the missing person really looks - our main goal was to get the people talking about the problem and engage them in promotion of SNAP.ZAGINIENI.PL - foundation's website, where you can find real photos of missing teenagers.

ITAKA is the only foundation involved in looking for missing children and teenagers. Every year, 8,000 young people disappear according to the police. Still the best way to find them is by showing their pictures, wherever it’s possible.

Given the so-called 'good change' on the Polish political scene and the accompanying limitation of subsidies for NGOs, ITAKA Foundation has serious problems with reaching the society at large with its messages. The brief was about finding a way to engage more people in search for missing children. May 25 – the Missing Children's Day – was the perfect occasion to see it through.

Because the foundation has no financial means that would be sufficient to distribute the photos of those missing more widely, we decided to engage teenagers in the task via Snapchat – as the best medium, targeted directly to them.