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How is Adopt a Character doing after a month?

January 18th 2016

tl;dr: Alright.

Earlier this month, we wrote about the Unicode Consortium’s Adopt an Emoji – or more properly Adopt a Character – initiative. You can read more Adopt a Character here.

We thought we’d follow up and see how well the campaign is doing.  The Unicode Consortium published its press release announcing the Adopt a Character program on December 16, 2015. That’s roughly a month ago.

Tallying up the donations listed on Unicode’s website (here), it looks like the Unicode Consortium earned $50k in the last month.  Here’s the breakdown:

  • 8 Gold Sponsors X $5,000 each = $40,000
  • 1 Silver Sponsor X $1,000 each = $1,000
  • 90 Bronze Sponsors X $100 each = $9,000
  • Total: $50,000

To be fair, $50,000 is not bad for a month. If this were a Kickstarter campaign, it would be considered a relatively successful one month.

Poo emoji as rendered by AppleBut this is Unicode! It’s used in millions of websites and applications. The Adopt a Character campaign was covered by Wired, the Atlantic, VentureBeat, PCWorld and numerous smaller publications.  BusinessWire picked up the press release, and it was republished by Reuters. Given the attention it got, and the importance of the Unicode Consortium, it’s somewhat surprising that they only managed to raise $50k in a month.

It seems like Adopt a Character will become a permanent initiative, so the Unicode Consortium does have time to raise more money. We’ll revisit this next month, and see how Unicode is doing.  In the meantime, Adopt a Character!