'When their world turns upside down' was the metaphor that summed it all up: that sudden change for the worse inflicted by conflict or disaster.

To lead the campaign, we created a video that took the metaphor to a literal extreme. A normal family of four enter that universally recognised sanctuary of childhood: a playground. But each time the children literally turn upside down, the film slips into a parallel universe where they have become victims of a catastrophe.

Each ‘slip’ was based on the true story of a real child helped by Unicef. The end-frame of the video linked each scene to the equivalent real case study on the Unicef website, providing a concrete tie between fiction and fact, between the video we filmed with actors in England, and the videos we filmed of their real-life counterparts: child-victims of disasters in Nepal and Syria.

Prior to the launch, Unicef’s celebrity ambassadors turned their profile pictures upside down to create intrigue amongst their fans. When it came to the day of the launch, they revealed that it was in support of Unicef’s campaign by sharing the film.

We also pushed the film out to press alongside the more informational report that linked to the petition. The film was launched using both YouTube and Facebook’s native player.

We identified that we would see an uplift across press with the Upwardly Urban audience whilst Generation X-Factor would probably consume content more readily on Facebook. Therefore for Facebook we asked people to share the film whilst for YouTube we asked people to sign the petition.

For YouTube we used annotations to link to case studies of children who had been affected by the issues covered. We launched the films on Facebook in a series over the subsequent week.

The video has been viewed more than 5 million times across social media channels, prompted more than 70 articles across major news sites and contributed towards driving 66,000 signatures to the petition. The overall campaign raised more than £2.8M for Syrian causes in just two months.