About this
Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand is the local branch of the global human rights movement, working across Aotearoa and the wider region to research abuses, campaign for justice, and mobilise people to defend dignity, equity, and freedom. Sometimes, charities try to break through the noise and come up with new and innovative ways to bring themselves to the public’s attention. This was a social experiment on Facebook, and it worked, we got a ton of press and a lot of brand recognition.
Check out my other mahi:
I’ve been sentenced for 1106 convictions for 8 crimes in 49 countries. Beaten 299 times in 3 countries, tortured 206 times in 3 countries, imprisoned 471 times in 3 countries, lashed 4 times in 2 countries, stoned to death once in 1 country, killed by extremists 366 times in 2 countries, and persecuted 604 times in 2 countries.
What am I talking about?! An exciting social experiment called Trial by Timeline.
Trial by Timeline scans your Facebook timeline and searches for certain keywords to do with alcohol, sexuality, and political preference and then lets you know what your punishment would’ve been if you were living in those countries.
Running a multi-partnership project like this was huge! Amnesty Campaigns & Advocacy team (and me of course) worked alongside a team from Colenso BBDO (who worked pro-bono! Thanks!) to develop the design. At the time of development (2012), Amazon’s EC2 hadn’t been around that long (okay 6 years!) but our technical team still had to work through a bunch of glitches to get the whole thing running smoothly.
We did the media rounds and made a pretty slick promo video (if I do say so myself)
Colenso BBDO won the D&AD Yellow Pencil, Caples Gold, Axis Silver Awards for their creative input.
As the technical director, there were many learnings. As we were a non-profit charity working with pro-bono agencies, it meant that, even though we were the client, we often did not have final say on creative direction or final functionality.
With the advantage of hindsight, if I am presented with an opportunity like this again, I would be more insistent on having mutually advantageous outcomes. One great regret was not creating a way to reach out to the potential donors from the resulting app. It had nationwide media coverage and there should have been internal KPI on membership or donations which would have given a more useful metric of success.
In the Media
We did feature in a few publications though!
