How Coherence Turned Tweets into Donations with WWF

WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) is one of the world's leading conservation organisations. Its #EndangeredEmoji campaign was the world's first emoji-based fundraising initiative. Coherence built the scalable system architecture behind it, so WWF could handle huge spikes in engagement when its brand ambassadors encouraged millions of followers to take part.

The Challenge

When Wieden + Kennedy realised that 17 of Twitter's animal emojis represented endangered species, it worked with WWF to create the #EndangeredEmoji campaign. The idea was simple: turn emoji use into donations for WWF's conservation work. The technical challenge was a system that could handle huge surges in Twitter activity, particularly when high-profile ambassadors retweeted to their large audiences. WWF needed a back end that scaled dynamically to thousands of tweets per second and tracked the donations linked to emoji use.

The Approach

WWF, Wieden + Kennedy and Twitter turned to Coherence for its experience of building scalable digital platforms.

Scalable architecture. Coherence designed the back end in Docker containers, with a horizontally scalable architecture based on RabbitMQ, MongoDB and Python workers. It could scale quickly to meet spikes in engagement whenever WWF's ambassadors promoted the campaign to their millions of followers.

The campaign mechanic. WWF tweeted an image showing all 17 #EndangeredEmoji, and users who retweeted it were registered automatically. Every time a registered user tweeted one of the emoji, WWF tracked it and added 10p as an optional donation. At the end of the month, WWF tweeted each registered user a link to their donation page, showing the total of their tweets, so they could make an optional contribution based on their activity.

High engagement. The architecture processed thousands of tweets per second without disruption. Coherence worked closely with Twitter to track emoji use across the platform in real time.

The Outcome

The campaign drew more than 12,000 retweets on its first day, and more than 500,000 Twitter mentions and more than 59,000 registrations in its first four days. The back end let WWF manage and track donations efficiently, turning social media activity into real support for endangered species.