We built an automated engine to hijack the global conversation and set out to remind people of one thing, that refugees are human beings.

It found comments on Twitter containing the word, “refugee” and automatically replaced that word with the phrase, “human being” - Tweeting it back to the sender and reminding the world that these are human beings that we are talking about.

We set out to remind people of one thing, that refugees are human beings.

We created an automated engine that scraped the global conversation on Twitter to find comments containing the word, “refugee.” It automatically replaced that word with the phrase, “human being” and Tweeted it back to the sender. To make the responses more contextual, the engine would use the word “human” if it was more relevant.

Our campaign soon spread and garnered an enthusiastic response from the Twitter community. When someone responded to our automated Tweet, a team of Community Managers who were monitoring the activity would engage in further conversation – humanizing our message even more.

The breadth of this conversation gave the campaign global reach, infiltrating the White House, media organisations, politicians, celebrities, and ordinary people.

We set out to get people talking and with zero media budget, we changed the global conversation and compelled people to change their perceptions of this human crisis.

79.6 Million Impressions

103,000 Conversations Started

139,737 Mentions

With this campaign we were faced with a problem on a global scale - the way people worldwide think and talk about ‘refugees’. In order to address this problem we needed to come up with a simple and scalable solution that could have a global reach and a lasting impact. Using an automated engine on Twitter to use Twitter users’ own words to change their perceptions allowed to us to confront this overwhelming problem. It is a simple and inexpensive solution, and one that potentially could be applied to a multitude of issues in today’s globally connected.

We chose to run our campaign on Twitter because of the instant and global nature of the platform - this allowed us to continue the conversation as it happened – making even more of an impact.

Working within the dynamics of Twitter and acknowledging user behavior on the platform, we set up four different Twitter accounts. This allowed us to gain maximum reach and ensure constant conversation – we also included our campaign hashtag (#HumanCrisis) on the end of each response. The time between Tweets was regulated to ensure that we didn’t over saturate the conversation.

By Tweeting the revised Tweet back to the sender, we gave them and all their followers something to think about. When someone clicked on our Twitter Handle, they were able to see information regarding PASSOP and their mission – they were also then directed to the website should they want to know more.

The media reporting on the humanitarian crisis has painted a large group of people as “refugees”… de-humanizing them and leaving them homeless. This negative news coverage has created social tensions and has had an important impact on the lives of asylum seekers and their level of integration into society.

People Against Suffering, Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP) is a not-for-profit human rights organisation devoted to fighting for the rights of asylum-seekers, refugees and immigrants.

They wanted to make people think about and understand the implications of their words and consider their own role in the crisis. To do this, we set out to get people talking about the dehumanizing connotations of the word “refugee” and remind the world that these are people with real fears, hopes and dreams.