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Brief
The Prince’s Rainforest Project is a campaigning organization set up by HRH The Prince of Wales to raise awareness of the damaging effects of deforestation for everyone and to identify appropriate incentives that will encourage rainforest nations to stop burning down vast areas of valuable forests.
Cake was asked to use digital communications on behalf of The Prince’s Rainforests Project to raise worldwide awareness of the link between rainforests and climate change from April 2009 until The Copenhagen Climate Change Summit
Strategy
The campaign aimed to call people to action to sign up to support emergency action to address rainforest destruction.
While Cake recognised that the environment and the plight of the rainforests were already much debated online, harnessing good will and genuinely cutting through online noise with clear messaging and call to action would not be easy.
Cake aimed to dominate the online news agenda with a launch which would maximise access and assets.
The strategy aimed to see HRH The Prince of Wales embrace online communications in a way which in itself would be newsworthy.
The strategy was to create a genuine media first and harness the power of online PR. In a landmark first for the British monarchy, the campaign launched on 5 May 2009 with a ground breaking simulcast from HRH The Prince Charles of Wales on YouTube and MySpace.
Cake aimed to create mass awareness for the campaign by dominating the online news agenda in both the UK and US at launch.
Execution
In an innovative online broadcast, HRH The Prince of Wales introduced the initiative, directly called young people online to action and presented a film full of stars from around the world who care about the rainforests to engage the audience.
Short messages of dedication were created as collateral to recruit sign up and engagement with the campaign. Names included Daniel Craig, The Dalai Lama, Robin Williams and Harrison Ford.
To maintain campaign momentum, entertaining short-form films and content featuring the campaign emblem, an animated frog, were filmed and distributed exclusively to a number of online media partners and ambassadors.
Cake’s team in London led the campaign and worked hard to create a social media based movement to support the campaign through working with influential bloggers and creating and vigorously maintaining social media profiles in Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter which actively engaged and informed fans, friends and followers.
The campaign team also encouraged celebrities, organisations and media partners who supported the cause to use their social media presence and websites to promote the campaign.
Tools with a high ‘talkability factor’ to draw people to the campaign website and to sign-up, such as a programme to allow people to create a ‘frog’ video of themselves on the site by uploading pictures or using webcam footage, helped maintain interest, whilst also generating sign- up’s to an online declaration on the campaign website demanding short-term aid to help stop deforestation.
Results
Above all else, Cake used this campaign to change perceptions and value of online PR – if the future British monarch understood the power of online PR to call people to action, then any remaining sceptics should finally be convinced.
As the world- first HRH simulcast went live, the film was also shown, via editorial placements, on major websites across the UK/US within the same hour.
The sites included : Times Online, Sky.com, USAToday.com, Treehugger.com, The Huffington Post, BBC.co.uk, Yahoo.com, dailymail.co.uk, guardian.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, itv.com, Sun Online, Mirror.co.uk, New York Times Online, Tiscali, MSN, AOL, Evening Standard Online, Time.com, Channel 4 Online. This high impact launch, truly delivered against the strategy – dominating the online news agenda for several days.
Since launch, editorial coverage about for the campaign has been secured on over 40,000 blogs and on over 8,000 news websites.
A stream of video clips relating to the campaign and created to maintain online interest over many months, have received over 5.4 million views.
Cake created Myspace, Twitter, Bebo and Facebook profiles which we maintained and managed for The Prince’s Rainforests Project and have gained over 35,431 fans/followers/friends.
During the campaign we establised a twitter feed (which we still manage) that which now has over 3,000 followers who actively engage with it on a daily basis. (http://www.twitter.com/rainforestSOS).
These celebrities enlisted to push the campaign included; Stephen Fry, Larry King, Jonathan Ross, Eddie Izzard, Ellen Degeneres, Vivienne Westwood and many more. Their respective tweets alone have reached over 20 million people.
The Prince’s Rainforest Project widget has had over 500 unique users and more than 8000 user generated frog films have been created by members of the public through the frog video mash-up tool on the website.
The communications part of the campaign came to a close in November 2009 with over 250, 000 people having signed up to send out an SOS to world leaders to stop climate change.
Return on investment (ROI) in relation to strategy.
Based on editorial media value of the campaign of £7,401,196 it has delivered a return on investment of 195 :1. The OTS of the campaign was 158,615,489 with a total number of editorial mentions at 19,469.
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