Objectives

Background:

The Goldman Environmental Prize celebrates everyday heroes who demonstrate the power of grassroots activism in the fight to protect our planet: ordinary people who have made an extraordinary impact.

The Ask:

Demonstrate x DDW was asked to develop a brand communications strategy and creative campaign that would introduce audiences to the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s foremost award for grassroots environmentalism, and drive awareness of the 2023 Prize Ceremony. 

We also sought to give a platform to the six Prize winners of 2023 by shining a spotlight on their individual stories and their extraordinary impacts.  

The Objective:

Increase awareness of the Ceremony, the Prize, and its winners, with a focus on video views and website traffic. 

Key deliverables included engaging educational content that promoted the Ceremony and shared the stories of the 2023 Winners and their causes, brought to life via social-first and programmatic video content.

Strategy and Execution

Audience Insight:

We identified an audience of everyday activist communities: Communities who are feeling the effects of climate change or environmental injustice, and who are in search of tools, tactics and inspiration. 

Due to their personal, emotional connection to climate change, this audience is highly interested in stories of grassroots climate activism — especially when those stories are mirror images of their own, and demonstrate an achievable positive outcome.

But they are also in danger of burnout, and of feelings of powerlessness in the face of climate change. 

The Idea:

Our creative strategy focused on Ordinary People making an Extraordinary Impact for the planet — positioning the brand as a source of grassroots, David-vs-Goliath stories that can inspire, teach, and be used as a template for effecting environmental change.

Execution:

We created a storytelling campaign focused on the six Prize winners. 

Each Prize winner represented a unique cause which often required a deeper understanding of the ecological and political landscape. We brought their stories to life by focusing on their personal connections to the land, and by highlighting the “ordinary” tactics that these everyday heroes used to create monumental positive impact.

In order to strike a balance between inspiration and urgency, we leveraged journalistic photography shot in-situ with the Prize winners, paired with snackable educational content. 

Social media posts and videos spotlighted each of the six Prize winners’ causes, their impacts, and the habitats they worked to protect:

• Alessandra Korap Munduruku, an Indigenous leader who organized her community to prevent mining in Brazil’s northern Amazon and protected more than 400k acres of rainforest.
• Chilekwa Muma, an orphanage caretaker in Zambia who held mining companies accountable for toxic discharges — and whose UK Supreme Court victory set a new precedent for environmental accountability.
• Delima Silalahi, an Indigenous leader who led a campaign to protect 17,010 acres of biodiverse rainforest in North Sumatra — preserving Indigenous stewardship of critical carbon sinks.
• Diane Wilson, a Texas shrimp boat captain who fought tirelessly to protect local wetlands and waterways — and won a landmark case against one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies for illegal dumping of toxic plastic waste.
• Tero Mustonen, a fisherman and scholar in Finland who transformed 86,000 acres of former industrial peat mining sites into productive, biodiverse wetlands. 
• Zafer Kizilkaya, a marine photographer who organized local fishing cooperatives to create marine protected areas and safeguarded Mediterranean waters along 310 miles of Turkey’s coastline.

The Goldman Environmental Prize Ceremony was held on Earth Day, 2023. In the weeks leading up to the event, we flighted content across Goldman Prize’s owned social channels (Meta & Twitter).

We further partnered with Meta’s NowThis, VOX Media’s Sustainability Channel and Audacy podcast integrations to bring the Prize winner stories and the Goldman brand to an aggregate of demographic, psychographic, regional and niche communities who have personally experienced the effects of climate change and/or environmental injustice.

Results

The campaign delivered 11M+ impressions (20% over goal), including 935k+ podcast impressions, and 1.1M+ video views (+10%). Throughout the campaign, the delivered impressions consistently exceeded goals, achieving an over-delivery of 150k impressions.

Media placements drove over 203k+ clicks to the Goldman Prize website — the most clicks ever attributed to paid campaign efforts in the Goldman Prize’s 33-year history. 

Website traffic increased 700% YoY, with a 200% YoY increase of website visitors the day of the Ceremony. Overall Click-Through Rate increased 747% YoY. 

On Meta, Instagram video completion rate was over 98% (over 8x the benchmark). CTR on Meta was 5.78% (over 13x the Meta benchmark of 0.43%).

The VOX Media Video, targeted via their Sustainability channel, achieved an over-delivery of impressions (83k+), exceeding the goal impressions by 105%. Overall the campaign CTR of 0.14% was double the VOX benchmark, with some tactics excelling with over a 1.27% CTR.

Our most engaged audiences were young people, aged 25-33 — demonstrating that stories of everyday environmental heroes can drive relevance with even this notoriously burned out audience.

Media