Children’s Charities report uptick in donations due to Facebook cartoon character ‘campaign’

If you changed your avatar on Facebook last week to that of a cartoon character in support of “anti-child violence” (we still haven’t managed to parse that, but whatevs), you can tell all the haters (me included) to suck it, because some actual charities actually benefited from the “social media awareness campaign.”

It still stands to reason that not one child has been or stands to not be abused by tiny squares bearing the image of Spongebob, but at least some people got off their asses and did something in response to the campaign. (Although it’s possible it was in response to the backlash, and being told via Facebook that their profile pics are really not impactful one way or the other regarding whether kids are abused.)

Anyway, charities devoted to protecting children had this to say to Yahoo News on the subject:

“The entire thing has been very strange to us,” said Walt Stutz, the Director of Marketing for ChildHelp, a large, national nonprofit dedicated to the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect. “We believe the campaign started overseas and it snowballed through social media. We may not know where all of this came from, but charities like us are very grateful to whoever started it.”

The head of another charity says that she didn’t know what was going on at first, when a flood of small donations came in:

The Child Abuse Prevention Association CEO Jeanetta Issa also noted an unusual amount of small donations being sent through its site, ChildAbusePrevention.org.

“At first I wasn’t sure if the donations were even real – I thought it could have been spam,” Issa said. “We have a $1,200 increase in small donations and I couldn’t figure out why.”

Did you participate in the “campaign,” and/or did you follow up with real life action?