The Skoll Foundation wanted to bring its partnerships to life by sharing the stories of remarkable partners achieving meaningful large-scale change. In this moment where climate change is on course to be our most formidable existential threat, its grantee, Healthcare Without Harm (HCWH) is providing new perspectives and applying new solutions to it.
Skoll turned to Freethink to help reframing climate change as a health issue, and showcase how Skoll Foundation and HCWH is working to accelerate the worldwide engagement on climate change and inspire medical professionals to take their place as climate leaders.
Freethink identified that while many of the dangers associated with global warming are well known (e.g. intensified natural disasters, longer droughts, altered weather patterns, and glacial melting), one of climate change’s most prescient dangers remains under-discussed: dangers to public health.
To help reframe climate change as a health crisis, Freethink created a premium documentary on the topic. By featuring interviews with real-life medical practitioners affiliated with HCWH and leveraging their expertise, the documentary underscored the message that climate change crisis is a health crisis that increasingly is directly impacting patients. By taking viewers on that journey of how doctors are breaking out of their medical silos and considering at the wider societal systems that are impacted their patients health, the storyline naturally leads to the natural introduction and interest in HCWH, who was founded on that premise. This holistic way of looking at climate change also provides a new plan of action, new stakeholders, and solutions.
This video was accompanied by a robust distribution plan, with custom and natively designed placements on social media and our website (this includes custom key art, thumbnails, social copy, supplementary written content, newsletter promotion, targeted advertising). We also expanded the video reach with partner publications. Our dedicated publication team monitored and optimized the performance across platforms throughout the campaign, and our community team actively responded and engaged with viewers in the comment section.
This video was Freethink's most successful videos in 2020, capturing over 1.5 million views. This 5:30 minute documentary engrossed viewers until the end, with 201,000 completed views measured -- an impressive feat in a crowded and competitive marketplace for attention.
This video was successful even beyond our traditional American audience, with a spike in international audiences-- proving the quality of our video's ability to convey climate change is a global urgent crisis and the efficiency of our distribution plan. The video was also measurably successful with professionals in the healthcare sector, registering 35% of our audience- successfully delivering on the objective to introduce the HCWH mission with more medical professionals.
The video was positively received, garnering over 5,500 social engagements (shares, comments, likes). Within the comments viewers expressed how dire they believe climate change to be and a thankfulness for the new perspective of climate change and health. Our community team used the comment section as a teaching opportunity to provide viewers educational resources to act on their engagement.
We also received organic shares from publications Cheddar & Unreel, and healthcare organizations such as the Lung Care Foundation.
