Personal stories

This post was posted on 9th March, 2020 in UNICEF facebook page. It tells a story about children affected by conflicts in Syria and explains how UNICEF helps such vulnerable children. By this post UNICEF tries to gain readers empathy by telling how children try to survive after they lost their parents and how the oldest 12 years old sister has to take adults responsibilities and protect her siblings. It is explained that these children relies only on UNICEF who provides them with everything they need. This post also includes image of siblings, behind them there are shelters where they are staying, it shows audience the reality and what kind of living conditions these children have at the moment. The purpose of this post is to raise awareness of the dangerous situations that this conflict puts children in and encourage to put the guns down and solve problems without affecting everyone else around, especially children.

#ForEveryChild hashtag is used in every post about children that live in dangerous conditions. Most of the time a personal story of a child is shared to emotionally affect readers of the post and encourage everyone to join and spread the information about such situations so that governments would start to act. This hashtag is not only used by UNICEF, there are millions posts with this hashtag, and it is used by other organisations such as "UP Volunteers for Children" and different countries' UNICEF Facebook pages. It became a global hashtag that people can use to mark any post that is about children that are in danger. Even celebrities use it to support and spread awareness, David Beckham is one of the main supporters of this campaign and as he has a huge influence on social media, he encouraged netizens to share the film about violence against children through his post using #ENDviolence and #ForEveryChild hashtags (Social Samosa, 2016).

This post did get 3.5 thousand reactions/likes from the audience, comparing to other the same type posts that used hashtag #ForEveryChild it is an average amount of likes as other posts about children in dangerous situations because of the violence get from 3 to 5 thousand likes\reactions. This might be because other stories are more detailed or more emotional so attracts and affects more people. However, this post did not get a lot of comments, there were no discussions in the comments. People were reacting to this story by sending prayers to children and supporting this organisation. Some of the comments said: "Thank you UNICEF for your effort in making a world a better place" and "Love for Unicef. Love for Children", UNICEF have also engaged with its audience by replying how they appreciate the support and providing link to UNICEF Syria web page. Overall, comments were positive about UNICEF efforts to help children and people felt encouraged to spread such information as this post was shared 314 times which really helps UNICEF to reach wider audience. After this post, a story was not forgotten, UNICEF shared updates on March 10th and 14th adding more information on how these kids are doing and what help do they receive from UNICEF.

References:

Social Samosa. (2016) UNICEF uses David Beckham as the voice of #ForEveryChild. [online] [Accessed on 1st April 2020] http://www.socialsamosa.com/2016/12/unicef-david-beckham-for-every-child/