A few months ago, W+K creatives and animal lovers Jason and Joris had an idea for using social media to help save endangered species. So we put together a crack team of W+Kers and picked up the phone for a chat with WWF, an organisation we've always admired for its incredible conservation work.

Thankfully, WWF loved it and even agreed to change the organisation's iconic panda logo to a panda emoji. Fast forward to today and we're proud to announce the launch of our global social campaign with WWF and Twitter, created with technical partner Cohaesus.

Launching just ahead of Endangered Species Day this Friday, #EndangeredEmoji is an emoji-based Twitter fundraising campaign designed help support WWF’s work to protect precious species and their habitats.

The idea was sparked by the discovery that 17 characters in the emoji alphabet we use each and every day represent endangered species. Emoji have been used over 202 million times since they were integrated into Twitter in April 2014, and the number is increasing daily; we wanted to translate their ever-growing popularity into vital funds for WWF. 

#EndangeredEmoji is being run through the official @WWF Twitter account and at http://endangeredemoji.com. Here's how it works:

• WWF tweets an image showing all 17 Endangered Emoji (see it here). To take part in the campaign, all twitter users need to do is retweet the image.

• For every Endangered Emoji the user then tweets, WWF will track this and add the local currency equivalent of £0.10 to a voluntary monthly donation

• At the end of each month, users will receive a summary of their Endangered Emoji use, and can then choose how much they wish to donate. 

Want to get involved and help support the campaign? Retweet this image from @WWF to sign up, then Tweet away using these 17 emoji: