Monitoring
Status Pages
Pricing
Children’s charity UNICEF has hit out with an advertising campaign slamming the way in which Internet users interact with its messaging on social media sites such as Facebook – suggesting that for most users the engagement with the charity starts and ends with the click of a “Like”.
The campaign, created ad agency Forsman & Bordenfors, highlights that although social media campaigns can raise awareness, the fear from UNICEF in Sweden is that members that of the public tend believe that their “Like” creates value – social currency – but it appears to have also contributed to a falling rate in donations being made. So called “slacktivists” get a sense of accomplishment and participation by liking or sharing a Facebook post or a re-Tweet, but in fact are doing very little at all. And it’s real hard cash rather than social currency that pays for immunisation and other aid programmes.
Three new adverts ram this message home – making a direct call from the public for cash donations. In one a 10 year old orphan, left to fend for himself and his younger brother looks to the camera:
“Sometimes I worry that I will get sick, like my mom got sick. But I think everything will be alright. Today, Unicef Sweden has 177,000 likes on Facebook.”
Another of the adverts, ironically being shared and liked widely on social media reads:
“Like us on Facebook, and we will vaccinate zero children against polio.”
The concerns of UNICEF mirror those raised by the Kony 2012 campaign; a slick You Tube film which was designed to raise awareness, and ultimately bring to justice, the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. But whilst the You Tube video gains millions of views and was shared widely it didn’t lead to wholesale activism – the lobbying of governments and international organisations. It ultimately failed.
So the challenge remains for any charitable organisation – spreading the word about your campaigns in a purely superficial way is one thing. Getting money through the door or getting people to act upon your message in other ways another.
James Barnes, StatusCake.com
Share this
3 min read Adding a new website, launching a customer portal, or handing a service to a new team should be straightforward. Setting up monitoring is part of that job, but it is easy for a manual step to be missed when information is spread across several systems. StatusCake now integrates with viaSocket, giving teams a way to connect
7 min read A website may be standing and still be in trouble. It may answer a request, return a cheerful 200 OK, and yet load slowly enough that visitors begin to lose patience. Its certificate may be nearing expiry. Its domain records may have changed. A server may be filling its disk in the background, patient and
6 min read StatusCake tells you that something might be broken. Hermes can check whether it really looks broken, decide who should hear about it, send the email, and keep the record for tomorrow morning’s summary.
3 min read The allure of OpenClaw is undeniable. You deploy a highly autonomous, self-hosted AI agent, give it access to your repositories and inboxes, and watch it reason through complex workflows while you sleep. It is the dream of the ultimate 10x developer tool realized. But as any veteran DevOps engineer will tell you: running an LLM-backed
7 min read There are cloud outages, and then there are us-east-1 outages. That distinction matters because failures in AWS’s Northern Virginia region rarely feel like ordinary regional incidents. They tend instead to expose something larger and more uncomfortable: too much of the modern internet still behaves as though one place is an acceptable concentration point for infrastructure,
7 min read Artificial intelligence is making software easier to produce. That much is already obvious. Code that once took hours to scaffold can now be drafted in minutes. Boilerplate, integration logic, tests, refactors and small internal tools can be generated with startling speed. In some cases, even substantial pieces of implementation can be assembled quickly enough to
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
