Tweeting emoji will help save endangered animals

We all love emojis. They’re as simple as they are efficient. But we all too often take the tiny digital critters for granted.

That’s until now as the World Wide Fund for Nature just launching an online campaign to help raise awareness and donations for 17 emoji animals that are endangered.

Running with the hashtag #EndangeredEmoji, every cute, cuddly emoji animal you tweet will donate €00.10 / £00.10.

If you’re using a Mac, simply click the Twitter tweet box then press ALT-CMD-T for a list of emojis. Windows users need to right-click on the taskbar and choose “Touch Keyboard” inside the Toolbars section. A new icon will appear in your system tray in the bottom-right, which looks like a keyboard. Click this and the onscreen keyboard will appear. Click the emoji smiley face icon for the emoji keyboard.

Alternatively, you can just go and copy and paste them from Get Emoji or Mega Emoji.

To get in on the action, all you need to do is sign up by retweeting the following:

We’re using #EndangeredEmoji to save real animals from extinction. Please retweet to sign up and help. pic.twitter.com/hX1p1GEDZ9

— WWF (@WWF) May 12, 2015

All the emojis tweeted will be tallied up at the end of the month when WWF will send you a link to its official donation site. This means that there’s no obligation to donate. You’ll just be cooler if you do.

If you want to opt out, you can tweet “unsubscribe” to the WWF twitter account. So far, judging by the amount of retweets, well over 4 000 people have signed up.