London, United Kingdom – To mark the 21st International Missing Children’s Day, which was celebrated last 25 May, Child Focus, a Belgian foundation that supports the prevention and investigation of missing children, has launched a new campaign built around a website that can only be kept alive by the general public – just like the collective hope for the return of missing children.
The new website, which was created in partnership with Wunderman Thompson Antwerp, features moving portraits of missing children that demonstrate exactly what happens when those children disappear from the public eye – they gradually fade from view. Based on the number of visitors to the website and the number of missing person notices that get shared by using its ‘share now’ button, the portraits of seven children, all of whom have been missing for years, will either fade or become more visible.
The campaign also partnered with French illustrator Nabil Nezzar, who converted the original pictures from the children’s missing persons notices into lifelike, hand-drawn portraits. These children featured on the site are Liam Vanden Branden, Nathalie Geijsbregts, Théo Hayez, Antoine Plomteux, and Ken Heyrman, as well as Vincent Lamouris, and Gevriye Cavas.
Inevitably public attention for the website will decrease after a while but according to Kasper Janssens, Wunderman Thompson’s creative director, that is precisely the strength of the campaign. He said, “Keep Hope Alive acts as a lasting motivator to keep hope for missing children alive. And if the day does come that the children fade entirely, website visitors will instead see a relevant message that will motivate them to rekindle that hope, however small it may seem at the time.”
The campaign is available across social media and digital billboards, bearing the line ‘Don’t let missing children disappear’, to remind people that as long as they keep thinking about these children, they keep hope alive.
