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

Our automated engine 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 them that these are human beings that we are talking about.

The data from individual tweets helped us to target people who were already participating in this global conversation. By revising the content of their tweet and posting it back to them we were able to create highly personalised messaging that was targeted and relevant, forcing the recipient to reconsider their own role in this global crisis.

We built an automated engine to hijack the global conversation and remind people that refugees are human beings.

Our automated engine 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 them that these are human beings that we are talking about.

The data from individual tweets helped us to target people who were already participating in this global conversation. By revising the content of their tweet and posting it back to them we were able to create highly personalised messaging that was targeted and relevant, forcing the recipient to reconsider their own role in this global crisis.

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

Every time a person tweets or posts a message on Facebook, they broadcast some vital piece of information about themselves. We used this valuable data to create a campaign that was targeted, personalised, and relevant.

We built an automated engine to identify comments containing the word “refugee” and automatically replace that word with the phrase “human being” and tweet it back to the sender.

This highly targeted campaign was designed to infiltrate a global conversation about the “refugee crisis” and remind the world that these are human beings that we are talking about.

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.

By searching for uses of the word ‘refugee’ in Twitter data we were able to readily identify people participating in the conversation. This data crucially formed the basis of our targeting for the campaign.

Working within the dynamics of Twitter and acknowledging user behaviour 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.

The media reporting on the humanitarian crisis has painted a large group of people as “refugees”… dehumanising 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 dehumanising connotations of the word “refugee” and remind the world that these are people with real fears, hopes and dreams.