Stephen Colbert recently asked his fans to invade Norway—on Twitter, at least.
Norway isn’t the first Scandinavian country Colbert has targeted on social media—in 2012, he tried to take over Sweden’s Twitter account—but there’s a real cause behind the latest gag.
Colbert is hosting the Global Citizen Festival in New York City next month, headlined by Beyoncé, Pearl Jam, Ed Sheeran, and Coldplay. To get tickets, music fans have to earn their way in by taking action on a smorgasbord of causes.
Colbert’s cause is girls’ education. He wants to raise enough money for the Global Partnership for Education to be able to disperse $15 billion a year by 2020, with the goal of putting 58 million girls in school.
To mobilize support for that enormous goal, Colbert has enlisted his Twitter foot soldiers. He called on his fans to flood the Twitter feed of Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg with requests for Norway to increase funding for girls’ education using the hashtag #educationfjorall.
His logic: Norway is already a leader in girls’ education funding, and if they can commit even more resources to the cause, the rest of the world will follow suit. As apart of his appeal to the Prime Minister, Colbert tucked in to a plate of lutefisk while listening to Norwegian death metal.
Today, Norway’s Prime Minister responded with her own video.
“You’ve got your priorities right,” Solberg replied. “Lutefisk, Norwegian death metal, and girls’ education.”
Solberg said her government is increasing her country’s commitment to girls’ education, and she called on other countries to join the cause, and raised the goal to $22 billion every year until 2030.
It’s an unlikely partnership, Colbert and Prime Minister Solberg, but it shows some expert-level social media savvy deployed towards the worthiest of causes.