Inspiring Scouts Worldwide

Using the Power of Pictures to Connect the World’s Largest NGO - published on microsoft.com

Earlier this year, two huge earthquakes rocked one of the most remote regions in the world, killing thousands upon thousands, as well as injuring and displacing many more.

Providing the Scouting membership with information about these kinds of humanitarian initiatives is incredibly important to the organization, helping to boost recruitment, increase awareness of causes, and motivate others to participate. But finding an effective way of doing so was proving a real problem for Cynthia Marquez, Messenger of Peace Coordinator at the World Organization of Scout Movements. With 42 million members, the organization is currently the world’s largest youth network, changing lives around the globe. However, even in the age of social media, sharing (often confidential) information with the Scouting community is an incredibly difficult task.

“Our members come from all backgrounds, religions and cultures, speaking a wide array of different languages. As a result, communicating on a broad scale presents a significant challenge.”

“We soon realised that the best way to get our messages across was to do so visually. This is why we looked to Swedish crowd sourced photo sharing platform PicHit – as its co-founder Mathias Bjorkholm says ‘Photos have no language barriers.’”

The system was first recommended as a solution by HM The King of Sweden, Honorary Chairman of the World Scout Foundation, following a meeting with some of PicHit’s investors. Part of the BizSpark start-up accelerator program, and based on the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform, today PicHit, in conjunction with other tools, has been used internationally by the Scouts to share in excess of an impressive 35,000 images.

Read more on this inspiring cooperation between World Scouting, PicHit and Microsoft and how it strengthens World Scouting - HERE.