#FightFireWithFire: ALMA and California Community Foundation

Roughly 65 million fire emojis are used every day throughout social media. While most of the time this popular emoji is used to add spice to a light-hearted tweet, we wanted to take that energy and use it to help those affected by the very real fires happening in California. So, we are responding to tweets that include the fire emoji, driving Twitter users towards our donation page that is seeking $10,000 for the wildfire relief fund, California Community Foundation. Help us by spreading awareness to our #FightFireWithFire donation campaign.  

Link to donation site: https://www.crowdrise.com/o/en/campaign/fight-fire-with-fire

Tell us about your role in the creation of this work.

Gabriel Ferrer, Creative Director

Give us an overview of the campaign, what is it about?

The campaign is a crowdfunding idea using the power of social media to get donations for the fires in California by pointing out that while we’re on social media using the fire emoji constantly, there’s still a real fire affecting people in California. This observation hopefully makes people think of helping every time they use the fire emoji.

Tell us about the details creative brief, what did it ask?

There was no brief. The fire in California is horrific. The worst in history. We felt obligated as creative people to think of something to help. Our agency encourages proactivity so we knew we’d have the support to do something for good.

Which insight led to the creation of this piece of work?

We noticed that the fire emoji gets used a lot. Over 60 million times a day globally. We thought to ourselves, if we can target people that use the fire emoji and get them to reconsider the real fire, then maybe we can get some donations to the people that need it.

Can you share with us any alternative ideas (if any) for this campaign? Why was this idea chosen?  

There were no alt ideas. We chose this idea based on our ability to implement it quickly without spending any money. Any money spent should be towards donations.

What was the greatest challenge that you and your team faced during development.

It’s a Twitter campaign mainly because Twitter lets you search by fire emoji. We created a Twitter account just for the campaign, but Twitter shut it down as spam so we had to pivot to using our own personal accounts to tweet from.

What did you enjoy most about seeing this campaign through? Did you learn anything new from the experience?

I enjoy anything that does good for the world. The donations are part of it, but mobilizing a group of people to create something to help people in need is always rewarding.

Where do you see this campaign going in the future?

We’re hoping to get a social media partner to create donation notifications every time someone uses the fire emoji for a short period of time just to increase awareness of the ongoing issue. We want to shift the behavior of people when they use that emoji to be mindful of those affected by the fires. That would take it to the next level.