The World Food Programme has a photo-sharing app that tackles world hunger

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The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is tapping into social and mobile technology to tackle world hunger in a new way — launching a camera and photo-sharing feature inside ShareTheMeal, its charity app for fighting global famine.

Since launching in November 2015, more than 850,000 people have downloaded ShareTheMeal and provided 15 million daily meals to children in Yemen, South Sudan, Jordan, Syria, Malawi, and Cameroon. 

The app aims to make it as easy as possible to distribute vital food supplies via a smartphone. Its new camera feature lets people take photos of their food, overlay one of five Snapchat-like #ShareTheMeal filters, and then share the picture on social media after making a small donation. Users can give as little as 50 cents to feed a child for one day, or give more to fund a child's food supplies for one week, one month, three months, or one year. 

The app's new camera launched on August 19 to mark World Humanitarian Day and World Photo Day. It debuted as part of a global WFP campaign to raise awareness about and fight the ongoing food crisis in Northeast Nigeria, where an estimated 5.2 million people face extreme hunger, and 50,000, near-famine conditions. With help from ShareTheMeal users, the WFP will provide life-saving food assistance for 100 days to those children who are most at risk in Nigeria. 

This campaign illustrates how nonprofits and intergovernmental organizations can apply digital strategies — such as those of digitally-savvy brands and publishers — to address pressing issues. In this instance, ShareTheMeal taps into several trends in technology and media to engage millennials to take action: 

• Digital donations. Digital is growing importance as a channel for charitable giving. In the US, online donations were 7.2% of all charitable giving in 2016, up 7.9% year-over-year, and 17% of these donations were made via mobile. This equates to about $1.72 billion in donations made via digital platforms. For comparison, overall giving grew just 1% last year. These figures are based on Blackbaud's analysis of data from 3,098 organizations in the US with $24.1 billion in total fundraising in 2016.  
• Social media. As social media becomes more ubiquitous, its importance for advancing social causes also rises. Nearly 70% of all US online adults, and 86% of US online adults aged 18-29, use at least one social media platform, according to Pew Research Center. And according to last year's Millennial Impact Report, the platforms where Americans aged 18 to 36 engage most often with social causes are Facebook (84%), Twitter (54%), Instagram and YouTube (both at 47%).
• Culinary content. Food-related content is one of the most popular content categories on social media. Fifty percent of millennials look at food content in their social feeds daily, according to Esme Williams, VP of brand marketing at Allrecipes.com. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed's Tasty (1 billion views) and the Food Network (1.4 billion views) were the sixth and ninth most popular publishers on Facebook in June 2017. 
• Influencers and omnichannel. WFP Ambassadors participating in this include Manchester United manager José Mourinho and former Brazilian international and FIFA World Cup winner Kaká, who have close to 14 million Instagram followers combined. Over a hundred other global personalities are also supporting the WFP’s campaign, and #ShareTheMeal posts are being featured on Thomson Reuters screens in New York City’s Times Square and London’s Canary Wharf.
• Millennial altruism. About half of millennials in the US volunteered for or donated to a social cause over a given month-long period in 2016, according to the Millennial Impact Report. Meanwhile, the same organization behind that report found that 84% of millennials made a charitable contribution in 2014. Finally, a separate study recently commissioned by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) found that, out of all generations, US millennials are the most concerned about ending global famine.

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