Keep Hope Alive
A campaign site for Child Focus, developed together with VML Belgium. The drawn portraits of long term missing children only stay visible as long as people keep visiting. When the visitors stop coming, they fade away.
Child Focus
VML Belgium
Development
Don't let missing children disappear
Missing children only truly disappear when we stop paying attention. This website takes that idea literally: the more visitors, the more visible the portraits. When things go quiet for a while, they fade step by step.
The site features nine children who have been missing for years, with when and where they were last seen and how old they were at the time. Each portrait is hand drawn and builds up from a sketch to a fully coloured drawing as it comes into view. Anyone with information can call 116 000.
Portraits building up from sketch to drawing
- Portrait visibility tied to the number of visitors
- Intro text that adapts to how faded the portraits are
- Animated, hand drawn portraits with a handwritten name
- Share button per child with its own share link and social image
- Messages of support for relatives, moderated before publication
- Available in Dutch, French and English
Visitors keep hope alive
Behind the scenes, a small SQLite database keeps track of visits. Enough visits push the visibility percentage up, while a scheduled task lowers it whenever nobody has stopped by for a while. The text at the top of the page changes along with it, from a thank you to a call to share even more.
A counter at the bottom shows how many times people have helped keep hope alive. Visitors can also leave a message for the parents and relatives. Those messages only appear on the site after approval.