‪The United Nations joins Unsplash

The United Nations and Unsplash create an Open Visual Public Service Announcement System for the Internet

Mikael Cho
Unsplash Blog
Published in
3 min readMay 7, 2020

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A few weeks ago, the

put out a Global Open Brief to get help coming up with visuals in the fight against COVID-19.

The UN’s challenge: we need to get important COVID19 messaging out far and wide to reach as many people as possible as fast as possible.

“We are in an unprecedented situation and the normal rules no longer apply. We cannot resort to the usual tools in such unusual times. The creativity of the responses must match the unique nature of this crisis — the magnitude of the responses must match its scale.” – UN Secretary General, António Guterres

There were 17,000 submissions to the open brief. The submissions came from everywhere but there was no good way to get these visuals seen everywhere.‬

‪So we’re turning Unsplash into a visual Public Service Announcement System for the UN.‬ Our aim: get these visuals seen by 1 billion people in the next 30 days.

‪To do this, we’re collaborating with the UN to set aside featured placements on the Unsplash homepage:

And across relevant searches:

Plus, all the UN visuals on Unsplash will be available for open use across Unsplash’s network of 1,820 integration partners including Medium, Buzzfeed, Google Slides, Squarespace, and Adobe.

‪Time and again, we’ve seen that if we can get great visuals in front of creators, they will push the impact of those visuals further than we ever could have imagined.‬

‪Our and the UN’s aim is to make sure these visuals are seen by as many people as possible. ‬So that they may inspire even more creativity which will lead them to reach every corner of the world. ‬

“By reaching out to creatives around the world, we hope to inspire creators, influencers, talent, networks, media owners [and more] who can take these key messages and bring their own magic to them — a creative twist, a cultural quirk, an interpretation which helps amplify them to audiences we are not yet reaching.” — Dawda Jobarteh Global Head of the SDG Strategy Hub, United Nations

We’re going to give the UN the Unsplash Effect.‬

Thanks to

, founder of for sparking this idea.

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