W+K Amsterdam Donates Its Voice to Children for CHI Campaign

Everyone has the right to be heard, but millions of children around the world are being denied this basic human right. Calls for help from over 150 million children have gone unanswered in the last 10 years because globally child helplines don’t have the resources they need. A new international movement, Free Our Voices, is highlighting their plight by asking people to give their voices via an interactive online petition.

Launching today, Free Our Voices, is a global campaign initiated by Child Helpline International (CHI), a network of child helplines operating in 143 countries. Over 277 million children have contacted CHI in the last decade in need of care and protection, but over 50% of these calls, many of them about violence, neglect, suicide and sexual abuse, went unanswered due to lack of resources.

Created in partnership with Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam’s in-house creative incubator - The Kennedys - and the digital team at MPC Creative, the pro-bono campaign asks people to pledge their names and voices via an interactive online petition. The aim is to use the power of the collective voice-signatures to raise awareness and help CHI get the support needed from governments, corporations, and telecoms to ensure every child’s call for help is answered.

The website’s custom sound recognition technology allows visitors to sign the petition by verbally recording their name. Each recording is then visualised by a unique written signature determined by the frequency, sound, rhythm and speech pattern of each participant’s individual voice. Signatures can be further personalised with colour patterns and are easily shareable via social channels.

All signatures are rendered in real-time and captured in a 3D gallery in the shape of a young girl’s face - this 3D data-visualisation brings to life the unheard children at the very heart of the campaign. Visitors can explore the gallery to view their own signature and search names of other participants. 

Alvaro Sotomayor, Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam Creative Director, says: “This campaign is very close to our hearts. Toll free numbers in some countries aren’t really free, so we hope that by generating a significant amount of voice signatures we can encourage telecoms to waive all costs, and join us in making the right to be heard a basic human right for everybody.”

Andre Assalino, Interactive Creative Director at MPC Creative, said: “We developed a three-pronged solution where people can convey their individuality through their own signatures, which are transformed by the sound of their voice. They can explore a beautiful abstract gallery of all the signatures and voices donated so far, with everything brought together through a responsive HTML5 website, which leverages WebGL for the real-time rendering. People are at the heart of the experience - by creating a beautiful piece of bespoke content, they are literally adding their voice to the campaign”.

In addition to the interactive petition, the Free Our Voices campaign includes a film that depicts people from all walks of life acting as mouthpieces for a young child. The film features on the campaign site and will be seeded online to further help deploy the Free Our Voices message. 

Nenita La Rose, Executive Director at Child Helpline International, said: “Free Our Voices is designed to raise awareness about the issues child helplines face and to gather the support and resources we need globally to tackle them. Resources to provide more training for more counsellors, to open more channels of communication for the children and to take their stories to decision makers, in order to shape child friendly policies and strengthen child protection systems.”