100 million – that is how many people the UN SDG Action Campaign of the UN hopes to activate during its 2021 Global Week to #Act4SDGs, which takes place from 17-28 September. Since 2017, this annual event has encouraged people from all communities and sectors of society to help raise awareness and take direct action for the goals. Associations reach out to their members, companies to their staff and customers, schools to their students, and much more.
How you can participate
- The campaign invites organisations and individuals to register and to describe an action they have set up in support of the SDGs. This can be anything: perhaps organising a city walk to explore inspiring projects, encouraging people to practice home composting, or introducing a new school curriculum. Or maybe just publishing a video message to their followers on social media.
- Once registered, participants can present their action on a profile page. These actions are then captured and visualised in a global heat map.
- Participants can spread the word about their action and about the campaign using images, videos and even ready-made text modules provided on the campaign’s websites. (@SDGAction, #TurnItAround, #Act4SDGs)
- They can connect with other registered participants on a Facebook Group the Campaign has set up for them or get back to their profile page to share the results of their action.
Assets for communicators
One of the many interesting features of the Global Week is the organiser’s focus on making life easy for communicators. On a dedicated Trello board, they offer a broad range of assets for follow-up communication in 10 languages. Some examples:
A “Toolkit of SDG Actions” provides a rich collection of possible starting points for SDG communication: inspiring campaigns you can get involved in, augmented reality filters to attract attention on social media, tools for more ambitious projects like setting up a people’s assembly, and inspirations for individual action, as for example recording a message to the UN Climate Change Conference or signing an open letter.
An “Influencer Brief” offers help to social media influencers who would like to engage their followers on the SDGs, including key messages, sample scripts and video guidance.
The “Social media kit” contains ready-made text proposals for social media posts.
The “Turning Point Dialogues” are a video discussion format to give change makers from across the world an opportunity to talk about their visions. If you would like to produce and share your own Turning Point Dialogue, you will find a guidance on the campaign board.
For any kind of online format, communicators can choose among a wealth of images, videos, and logos.
So, if you would like to be counted among the 100 million participants the SDG Action Campaign hopes to mobilise, you could register one of your actions by 28 September.
This post is published in partnership with Engagement Global, a German service agency working on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) to engage civil society on issues of development co-operation.
The SDG Communicator 
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