By afaqs! news bureau
Digital

UN runs End Poverty by 2015 campaign on social media sites

The UNMC has engaged WATCOnsult to promote its campaign to end poverty on social media sites in South Asia

The United Nations Millennium Campaign (UNMC), the UN agency responsible for promoting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), is getting onto social media sites in South Asia to promote its End Poverty by 2015 campaign. The UNMC has engaged social media marketing agency WATConsult to execute the campaign in the region, including in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Rajiv Dingra, founder and chief executive officer of WATConsult, says, “WATConsult.com is engaged in using social media to make online youth aware of these goals and get them to participate in this noble cause, which aims to end poverty by 2015.”

UN runs End Poverty by 2015 campaign on social media sites
The YouTube channel
The campaign will be executed in three phases, both online and offline. In the first phase, the agency will focus on creating awareness about the cause. This phase is well under way and has already started receiving participation online through communities and groups.

Dingra claims that the End Poverty by 2015 communities and groups on social networks Orkut, Facebook and Hi5 have more than 1,200 members (most of them on Orkut). As many as 7,000 people have viewed the videos the channel created for the campaign on video sharing site Orkut. There is also a channel on the microblogging site, Twitter, where the campaign is being followed by 170 people, updating regularly on the cause.

UN runs End Poverty by 2015 campaign on social media sites
The Twitter page
The second phase will aim to engage the participants through the medium by running contests and building alliances with social media sites. This will be in the form of content and promotional alliances. Bloggers will also be invited to participate.

Dingra adds, “In this phase of the campaign, we will involve bloggers by providing them a blog badge available on WATBlog.com, through which they can show support for this noble cause. We will also be involving the youth online through interesting contests.”

In the third phase to be launched in October, there will be more ‘action’ as the online participants are asked to become more involved in the campaign. The details of this phase will be disclosed at a later stage.

Dingra says that the campaign has reached out to about 13,000 people online in the last two months. The UNMC and WATCOnsult hope to reach a million people by October, so they can participate in the action on October 17, which is Anti Poverty Day.

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