Background:
For 35 years, the Goldman Environmental Prize has celebrated grassroots environmental activists with a ceremony that takes place each year around Earth Day in San Francisco, where Prize winners from six global regions are announced and honored through storytelling at the ceremony.
Although the Prize and Prize Ceremony has been based in San Francisco since it began in 1989, there is low awareness of the Prize in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Ask:
Demonstrate x DDW was asked to create a brand communications strategy and creative campaign that would increase awareness amongst San Francisco audiences of the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s foremost award for grassroots environmentalism, and drive awareness of the 2024 Prize Ceremony.
We also sought to give a platform to the six Prize winners of 2024 by shining a spotlight on their individual stories and their extraordinary impacts.
The Objective:
We had two main objectives:
First, create a campaign that drives awareness of the Goldman Prize and the Ceremony in San Francisco, and which gives back to the San Francisco community in a way that reflects the Goldman Prize values.
Second, share the stories of the 2024 Prize winners and their causes through engaging educational content
Audience Insight:
We identified an audience of everyday activist communities who are feeling the effects of climate change or environmental injustice, and who are in search of tools, tactics and inspiration.
We knew that 2 out of 3 Americans say that climate change is noticeably affecting their local communities (NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, 2023), and that an even greater majority believe that climate activism doesn’t help (Pew Research Center, 2023).
Our 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.
The constant stream of doom and gloom has raised levels of climate anxiety to records highs, and the feelings of powerlessness in the face of climate change has created a sense of fatigue around the issue.
The Idea:
Our creative strategy focused on bringing the Goldman Prize’s inspiring message to San Francisco through a public art installation, and an accompanying digital campaign sharing the stories of Ordinary People making an Extraordinary Impact for the planet — positioning the brand as a source of grassroots, David-vs-Goliath stories to inspire, teach, and be used as a template for effecting environmental change.
Execution:
We brought the Goldman Environmental Prize’s mission and message to life in downtown San Francisco by developing GROW, a public art installation created by Bay Area artists Brian Singer and Laura Hapka.
Launched during Earth Month in the heart of the neighborhood where the Goldman Prize is celebrated, this sustainable sculpture was designed to be repurposed.
In keeping with our goal of creating a sculpture reflective of the Goldman Prize’s values, we partnered with local organizations to ensure that GROW would contribute to the greening of the community. We collaborated with a local urban forestry nonprofit to source the sculpture’s trees, being careful to select species that would thrive in San Francisco’s microclimates, and later planted them in local neighborhoods after the campaign finished.
We continued to build momentum and buzz for the 2024 Prize winners on our social and digital channels by launching a storytelling campaign: Ordinary people, extraordinary impact.
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.
We partnered with the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Standard to bring the Prize winner stories and the Goldman Prize brand to local audiences. We also amplified via Audacy and Meta, to target an aggregate of demographic, psychographic, regional and niche communities who have personally experienced the effects of climate change and/or environmental injustice.
The Goldman Environmental Prize Ceremony was held in April, 2024. In the weeks leading up to the event, we launched the GROW art installation and flighted content across Goldman Prize’s owned social channels, local media (San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Standard) and Audacy podcast integrations.
The campaign delivered 11.9M+ impressions (139% over goal), including 1.3M+ podcast impressions, and 250k video views. Throughout the campaign, the delivered impressions consistently exceeded goals, achieving an over-delivery of 5M impressions.
Local media placements drove over 5.4M impressions, a 333% over-delivery.
And the GROW installation was met with overwhelmingly positive responses, earning positive sentiment on social media, a feature in SF Climate Week and a request from the SF Arts Commission to develop an annual installation series
