We take your point about painting a blanket portrait. AMREF is dedicated to working across the continent of Africa and in this case the brief was necessarily about being representative of issues facing the whole, rather than to represent difference by country. We chose instead to represent a spread of individual stories of people AMREF has been working closely with, and to address the different situations they might face, such as health issues, maternity, education and sanitation for example.

Our challenge from AMREF was to raise awareness of their charity, which is relatively unknown in this country. We felt there was a trade off between raising maximum awareness & engagement as efficiently and least disruptively as possible to the people AMREF engage with, vs creating “live” status updates in keeping with Facebook functionality. We also believed that the latter would potentially lower sign-up (and hence reduce the spread of AMREF’s message), given that Facebookers wouldn’t know what to expect – at the moment it’s considered good etiquette to show what you’ll be publishing on their behalf, which we have provided as part of the functionality of the app when you choose who to lend your status to. In future, perhaps things will be different, right now it’s about experimenting with what’s possible in the space.

On your thoughts about witty banter, yes, that’s often the primary function of Facebook, but it’s not the only one – we feel that all of us regularly update our statuses with stuff we’ve found & think is interesting, not just chit chat. Likewise, if not more so, in respect of Twitter’s function. We hope this has been the reason behind people’s sharing and spreading of the campaign.

We are well aware that the work that AMREF do is far more complex and demanding than a Facebook app or ad campaign could ever hope to convey. We expect to use social media in new, more nuanced ways in future as we develop it. Your feedback has been invaluable in that respect, so once again thank you.

In the meantime, if this campaign has started to create awareness and discussion of the issues faced by those people AMREF works with, we hope you agree that is a positive step. We’ve been pretty humbled by the response so far.

Best wishes and thanks
Mareka & Kim

- The characters come from 4 East African countries but are headlined as the ‘Status of Africa’. Already too many people in the North think that Africa is a country, a single amorphous place marked ‘problem’, this doesn’t challenge that view.

- These may be ‘real people’, but they are not really tweeting. They remind me of the recorded voiceovers you get from ‘historical characters’ in museums. “I heard a rumour today that there are over 50,000 other poor people living in our slum” –… Imagine sending a tweet that said…. “I heard a rumour today that there were over 60,000 middle class people living in our mid-size suburban town” – just doesn’t ring true. Since Africans are not historical characters but real people (some of them even Facebook and Twitter users…)it begs the question of why they need to be ‘voiced’ like this.

- Its a bit po faced. A large portion of the status updates I read, and certainly more of the ones I forward are gently humorous to downright funny, even the serious ones are witty. The primary mode of discussion is banter. You can’t banter with these people because they are not real.

Please be assured that this is standard Facebook functionality – our app doesn’t do anything with your friends’ info other than to create a bank from which you can choose people to invite to join you in lending their status to Africa too.

Regards, Mareka