I spent most of 2009 in a leadership role on the TckTckTck global climate change
campaign, leading their digital strategy, but also being pretty involved with most aspects of our constantly changing campaign and communications strategy.
In our all out effort to influence the outcome of the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, we tried a lot of new things in an extremely short period of time. On the digital and media sides of the campaign, one might say, we threw a lot of spaghetti on the wall to see what sticked (which is our culture – everything we do is so new we're always experimenting).
So it was really quite rewarding to hear that some of those experiments bore fruit, so much so that this week in Maimi, our campaign was recognized as a "Game Changer" with a prestigious award from the We Media media innovation conference.
We Media is a conference of leaders among media publishers, technologists, and non-profits. Their theme this year was "almost nothing has been invented yet". You can read more in their feature on us, Resetting a global environmental countdown.
Some of the aspects of our campaign that they recognized as innovative, and game changing, were:
Our open source shared brand, TckTckTck (created by one of our partners' ad firm), that was everywhere in Copenhagen- The way we re-framed climate change from an environmental issue to a justice and development one
- How we got hundreds of "big brand" NGO partners to deeply collaborate, on strategies and actions, more than ever seen before
- The huge success of our global aggregation petition, with over 15M people from around the world signing on
- The innovative web tools we created to grow the petition and spread the word, including Facebook apps, mobile apps, widgets, and other distributed tools
- The way we used and empowered alternative media channels – specifically bloggers – to help spread our messages
- The Fresh Air Centre in Copenhagen, which was in many ways the culmination of many of our strategies in one physical media space
While the first three points relate to the visionary way this open campaign was structured (something I noticed from the start, recognized as extremely rare, and was very drawn to), the last four points were really led out of our digital shop.
This is where I get to shine the light on the amazing team I was able to work with, from my hard working boss Andrew Male who enabled us to make all this crazy stuff come to life, to my team at Communicopia who managed all aspects of production, to Tim Walker and Biro Creative who made us all look good (and helped with our early campaign strategy), to Aaron Welch and Advomatic who made everything work so well, to Darren Barefoot who built our social media campaign, to Kevin Grandia from Hoggan and Richard Graves who spent their own personal capital to drive our blogger outreach, to Beka Economopoulos and Steve Rio who brought the impossibly ambitious Fresh Air Centre to life. Many, many more people, staff, NGO partners, and firms contributed to our success.
So while in the end we did not, of course, succeed in getting a fair, ambitious, and binding climate agreement out of Copenhagen, the way we ran the campaign, aligned the movement, and activated millions of people to become more involved in climate was indeed something that changed the game.
Our Executive Director Kelly Rigg was on hand to accept the award in Miami this week. You can see a video and transcript of her explaining how our innovative shared brand worked, and as soon as I get it we will post the video from the actual awards talk, and the fun presentation we helped her create to describe what TckTckTck was all about and how we changed the game.
