Missing the point

For those of you on Facebook (I'm assuming that's everyone), you may have noticed several of your friends mysteriously transforming into cartoons over the last week. It appears this trend originally started in Greece as an attempt to remove all human faces from Facebook for a short while. Nothing wrong with that – sounds quite funny.

However, somewhere along the line the message got changed to “Change your FB picture to a cartoon from your childhood. The goal is not to see a human face on FB until Monday (Dec 6th). Join the fight against child abuse & copy and paste to your status!”

Now, this somehow became associated with the NSPCC, and a quick search of Facebook groups also shows a version for Unicef (I'm sure there are more too). Of course, none of these charities are behind this 'campaign', and despite NSPCC tweeting otherwise I'm not convinced it's much help to any of them.

Not including the inevitable Daily Mail paedophile story (which I won't even give the credit of a link to) there's been plenty of other negative press around this latest fad too, and not without good reason.

It's great to have supporters doing 'work' for your charity, and spreading the word and sharing with their friends and all. But when the charity has no control over the message, it all gets a little messy. Of course, if the original message had a less flimsy call to action than "Join the fight against child abuse", the shit-storm that is now inevitably following would be easier to deal with. "Change your profile picture and make a Christmas gift to the NSPCC". Now that's a status update worth sharing.

Not that anywhere near as many people would have done it – but it'd certainly be a better badge of honour, a show of how good a person you are. Sorry, but everyone thinks child abuse is bad. It's like changing my profile picture to a rainbow to show that Hitler was a baddie.

However, is there something charities can take from this apparent 'show of support'? It's certainly a sign that people care on some level. That small, easy actions increase engagement. I'm sure the however-many-hundred-thousand people gathered in the Facebook group could be convinced to join the NSPCC group with some gentle nudging. Those over 12, at least.

But would it work if it had come direct from the charity, or does it HAVE to be peer-to-peer to succeed? If we asked everyone to change their profile picture to a tiger for WWF, would Facebook be covered in stripy cats? Probably not. And therein lies the problem – the unpredictability of using Facebook and other social media sites to build real, long-term, solid support.

I'm sure it can be done, but we might need to come up with our own idea... and wait for the cartoons to disappear, of course.

Richard