Emojis, those digital icons using an image to express a thought, have gone mainstream and got their own ‘day’. WWF, Macmillan Cancer Support and Children’s Society are among the charities joining in to raise awareness of their causes and campaigns today.

Macmillan: ‘Our history in emojis’

Macmillan used the 71 characters to explain its history. For those not fluent in the language it has also posted a translation online.

The emoji history has been retweeted 89 times this morning and favourited 52 times.

Why we love it: as well as providing an entertaining challenge to decipher the long line of emojis, by linking to a translation on its website the charity is driving people to somewhere they can find out more information on the cause and potentially donate.

Children’s Society: ‘Guess the campaign’

This morning the Children’s Society asked its Twitter followers to guess which of its campaigns it was explaining using emojis.

There might be a hint in the tweet which asks if it is #SeriouslyAwkward - the hashtag the charity is using to urge people to sign its petition to introduce better legal protection for 16 and 17 year olds.

Why we love it: by cleverly tricking people following the #WorldEmojiDay trend into clicking on its hashtag, the charity is reaching out to potential new supporters.

WWF: donate with emojis

Twitter users can donate to WWF by using 17 animal icons in the emoji alphabet and for World Emoji Day the charity hasn’t been shy about reminding people they can do so using #EndangeredEmoji.

The charity tots up how many emojis people use throughout the month and suggests a donation of 10p for each endangered animal.

It launched the campaign in May, and after one month the most popular emoji was the monkey, followed by the whale and then the panda.

Why we love it: Spy reported WWF’s innovative emoji fundraising campaign #endangeredemoji earlier this year, but we love it so much that we thought we’d do an update.