#Fact Fridays with The Global Goals
- A social media Project

We were delighted to be asked by Project Everyone to help them in their mission to report on the progress of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals - which is a cause close to Cognitive hearts having worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the past.

On the subject of the Global Goals for Sustainable Development Bill Gates recently said:

'On the whole, the world is getting better. This is not some naively optimistic view; it’s backed by data. Look at the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. Since 1990, that figure has been cut in half. That means 122 million children have been saved in a quarter- century, and countless families have been spared the heartbreak of losing a child. And that’s just one measure. In 1990, more than a third of the global population lived in extreme poverty; today only about a tenth do. A century ago, it was legal to be gay in about 20 countries; today it’s legal in over 100 countries. Women are gaining political power and now make up more than a fifth of members of national parliaments—and the world is finally starting to listen when women speak up about sexual assault. More than 90% of all children in the world attend primary school. In the U.S., you are far less likely to die on the job or in a car than your grandparents were. And so on' (Time Magazine Vol 191.2018)

In 2012 we created a set of icons for six of the Global Goals:

So, the aim of The Global Goals project is to create positive messages around the work being done globally to make progress in a number of areas identified by the UN as being of particular importance.

The goals cover a complete range and include politics, society, education, the environment and health and welfare. There are 17 goals in total and they include Ending Poverty, Gender Equality, and Action on Climate Change and the goals have an end date of 2030.

Project Everyone use The Global Goals social media platforms to reach out to a global audience to try and make the goals for Sustainable Development, and the progress being made, more widely known.

Paddy Delaney from Project Everyone said:

'The over-riding theme of The Global Goals messaging is one of positivity.

We want the viewers and followers across our social media accounts to feel engaged and enlivened by the positive actions and measures that are being taken around the world to address the goals aims. The news is full of negative stories about how bad the world is, but this story is only partially true! Lots of progress is being made in many key areas.

We don't want to browbeat the audience with negative facts because we want to show that more progress is being made than they think! In fact, as Bill Gates said in his recent article in the The Times Magazine, many of the goals are achievable by 2030! We work with Cognitive because they have a track record of being able to present data and facts in an appealing and immediately engaging way..and their work with us often has a massive reach'

Georgia Alford of Project Everyone said:

'It is really important for us that all of the work, as well as being well-designed, is factually accurate.  

We want to reach as wide an audience as possible; so in order to broaden our potential reach we plan a few months ahead around what we feel will be newsworthy at the time.

For example, we planned #FactFriday social around the World Economic Forum in Davos in January highlighting that for the first time they had an all female panel of co-chairs. With the images that Cognitive create, we are then able to be slightly ahead of the curve, and sometimes we have a massive leap in our reach just with one image that can be seen, understood and shared instantly by thousands of people'

They say that pictures paint a thousand words and in our work with The Global Goals we believe this to be true!

In the space of one image we are able to illustrate the who, what, when where and why and make the fact immediately understandable to a viewer that may know nothing about this topic. We have supercharged the facts and used our visual thinking to create shareable and likeable images that sum up their campaign and its goals.

If you have a campaign that you would like 'super-charged' then do contact us on 01303 253 693.

Below are some of the images from the #FactFriday Campaign along with the text that accompanied them on Twitter.