Social Change Initiative

Accenture: Earth Day

I turned Accenture’s employees into a powerful force for change on Earth Day.

 

Problem - Earth Day is an annual event celebrated around the world on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. On Earth Day, most brands only go as far as an obligatory social post. Accenture wanted to go much further and rally their people to make an impactful statement.

The Big Idea – Switch on, to switch off . An Accenture-Europe-wide education initiative to help employees ‘switch on’ to what Earth Day is all about… to help them ‘switch off’ when it counts.

Creative Execution – A data-powered social-change-initiative that rallied 40,000 Accenture-Europe employees to do their part for Earth Day.

Stage 1: Launch

The launch stage was designed to enrol Accenture Europe employees in the Accenture Carbon Club – a large group of people dedicated to cutting carbon using small, simple everyday initiatives.

We began with a large series of launch assets designed to engage Accenture Europe employees with Earth Day and spread positive sentiment about getting involved and participating – no matter how small the contribution, it all adds up to bring about real change.

Internal advocates and
green seminars designed
to educate.

We built a special group of environment advocates across Accenture Europe and had them help drive activity a grass roots level.

They spun up teams channels, hosted seminars and helped people understand what it was we were doing, why we were doing it and how to get involved.

We then reached out and got key Accenture clients involved to talk about what it means to pivot to a greener way of doing business.

Stage 2: Driving employees to pledge to Earth Day activity.

Its at this point that we turned all that good will into real world action by asking all 100,000 Accenture Europe Employees to make a pledge to take real action on earth day.

Employees could do as little or as much as they liked. We presented them with a tiered system – where they could do basic things like dimming their laptop screen for a day, to going veggie for a day.

An Earth Day pledge portal that captures carbon data in real time.

We set up a basic Earth Day portal site where the 100,000 employees could submit their pledges for Earth Day and tell us what action they would be taking – this allowed us to capture data about the amount of carbon we could offset – because using the site, we could tally up the action the employees took.

Timely content to kick off the Earth Day pledges.

On Earth Day itself we promoted a series of comms across all Accenture's owned platforms reminding the 100,000 employees that it was Earth Day and that they should fulfil their pledge.

These comms comprised everything from banner ads on internal sites, to advocates sessions, email reminders and even custom Spotify playlists.

When Earth Day came around, those who pledged (*nearly 40% of our audience) went away and fulfilled their pledges.

*This figure surpassed all our expectations. We were anticipating an engagement rate of 10%, rather than 40%

Stage 3: Quantifying and publishing our real world Earth Day action.

When Earth Day ended, it was time for us to tally up the positive impact we achieved.

We knew, through simple maths, how many people had pledged to to do each activity – from this we worked out our environmental impact is and created a series of assets that promoted the impact in real terms.

This resulted in a campaign that wasn’t creative for creatives sake, but was tangible, grounded and true to life – a real story of how many people came together to do something great.

Stage 4: Rewarding employees who took part (and keeping the campaign going).

After Earth Day, the client wanted to give a personal thank you to all 40,000+ employees who had taken part.

We decided to give each and every one of them a plant. Rather than drop it on their desks, we instead created an entire living wall in the atrium of the Accenture Paris HQ - over forty thousand plants all in one place.

Plant power, meets data-power in the final phase of the campaign.

Taking ques from the data powered nature of the main campaign, we were able to work out how much carbon our plant wall was able to offset on a daily, monthly and yearly basis – which allowed us to continue the campaign throughout the entire year.

This is a great example of how minimal employee engagement can really result in something big worth shouting about!

All those little pledges added up…

 

1M+

ESTIMATED impressions of the campaign assets.

40k

PLEDGES to action on Earth Day.

28.5

TONNES of estimated carbon offset.

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