Development Seed Blog

Stand Up Speak Out Campaign Breaks It’s Own World Record

I’d like to send a big congratulations over to the UN Millennium Campaign and especially to everyone who worked on and participated in the Stand Up Speak Out campaign. A whopping 38.8 million people in 110 different countries took action yesterday and Wednesday to show their support to end poverty! Not only did they break their own Guinness World Record for the number of people to stand up to demand action on poverty, but they surpassed the record by 15 million people. 

As people were taking action around the world, they were also organizing events and posting updates online at StandAgainstPoverty.org, a Drupal website we worked on with Jason Wojciechowski and his team at the UN Millennium Campaign. The website turned into a great showcase of the success of the events taking place around the world. In total, people posted information about 5,579 different events they were hosting. 

They posted even more photos – more than 6,300 photos of events were uploaded to the campaign’s Flickr account as of 2:00 pm today. Most of these photos were uploaded through the Flickup module, a module we developed and installed on the site to let people upload photos to a node in Drupal and at the same time tag photos with an associated ID. This let us pull photos that are on Flickr back to StandAgainstPoverty.org and display them there. We decided to show them off in this slideshow. 

A huge benefit to using this module was that all of the photos are hosted on Flickr, and not on the server of the site itself. This was a big help to us in this campaign since we expected a lot of traffic. With the photos coming off of Flickr.com itself this meant less load on the website server. This, along with Drupal’s scalability (like caching and CSS file aggregation), made it easy for us to keep the website running smoothly when it was attracting a ton of visitors.

Again, congratulations on such a successful campaign! It’s really amazing to see so many people taking action to show their support of ending poverty.