How do you persuade 1.8 billion people to take one action?
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Earth Hour is the world’s largest sustainability movement, held on the last Saturday of every March. By asking people to switch off their lights for an hour, it allows individuals across the globe to take a united stand against climate change. And that’s exactly what 1.8 billion people in 135 countries did this year. Most people aren’t aware that Earth Hour is a WWF initiative; meaning participants often don’t support the charity’s longer-term campaigns. WWF-UK wanted to tackle this problem by aligning Earth Hour more closely with their brand. But they also wanted to increase Earth Hour participation generally – rolling out a research-based, integrated campaign that not only made best use of social media, but effectively targeted a younger audience too.
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If the Earth Hour campaign was to have both broad and fresh appeal, we needed to establish what attracted participants to it in the first place. This meant carrying out some comprehensive audience research – surveying people online and conducting a range of focus groups. We also looked at the best way to position Earth Hour – making sure it connected closely with the WWF brand whilst remaining up-to-date, interesting and all about ‘going beyond the hour’ in a lifelong commitment to sustainability. With the research in mind, we rolled out an integrated campaign across social media, digital and viral communications and print. This was not only directed at the widest possible audience, but was designed tell the whole story of Earth Hour - from climate change to global celebration.
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The Earth Hour 2012 campaign looks set to attract the biggest response to date. More young people around the world should finally start engaging with the campaign, whilst stronger branding will encourage more participants to longer-term support of WWF’s activities. To see just what sort of impact the campaign has, look out for Earth Hour 2012 on Saturday 31st March.
© Earth Hour Global
WWF-UK Earth Hour