Client: Cambridge Conservation Initiative
Project: Earth Optimism Cambridge
The client
Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) seeks to transform the global understanding and conservation of biodiversity to secure a sustainable future for all life on earth.
The partnership is a unique collaboration between the University of Cambridge and nine leading internationally-focused biodiversity conservation organisations including RSPB, Fauna & Flora International, and the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre.
The brief
As part of the worldwide Earth Optimism movement, CCI runs Earth Optimism Cambridge: an event that shares success stories to inspire and solutions to make a difference. It welcomes some of the world’s leading conservationists and most passionate celebrities including Sir David Attenborough, Liz Bonnin, and Chris Packham.
With an extensive amount of content for this online summit and a small team on the project, they needed a specialist event marketer to dive in and lead a social media campaign that would deliver results.
The aim was to reach the general public who don’t know much about conservation, those that are not sure how to make a difference - but given the right information, could make a huge impact.
Building a solid relationship with the team, a secondary brief followed to deliver a legacy project which would allow people to explore the Earth Optimism Cambridge content further and find out more about conservation.
“Working with Jemma was absolutely fantastic: she got to grips quickly with a pretty complicated event, understood how to work effectively with us all, ran an excellent social media campaign, and was energetic, organised and professional throughout.”
The main event
To achieve the objectives of this project we delivered the following:
Social media campaign
We created and delivered the organic social media campaign covering pre-event to build awareness, during the event to encourage engagement, and post-event to drive views of on-demand content. This was complemented by a highly targeted paid ads campaign focused on driving event responses. Copy for each individual session was written to inform and engage, and we created visually impactful tiles using the Earth Optimism branding.
Email marketing
The team wanted attendees to view as much of the content as possible, so re-engagement was of high priority. With this in mind, we delivered an email campaign to reach those who had registered for a live session, highlighting further content from the festival being available on-demand. We handled the setup, list management, copy, and template design to deliver a post-event email tied into World Earth Day.
Highlights video
As part of the legacy project, the CCI team required a highlights video and needed us to manage the project. We selected the key content from the 10-day event and sectioned it into three main messages, storyboarded the entire piece, and worked closely with the highly skilled OH Films! (the producers of the original content) to pull the finished article together.
Legacy website
The final piece of the puzzle was to rework the website, turning it from date-focused to content-based / an on-demand player. This involved work from us on the structure, copy, images, and briefing the clever team at Chameleon Studios to deliver some technical work that would allow visitors to search the solutions in a meaningful way.
The results
Our work on this project contributed to the following successes:
40,000+ users to the Earth Optimism website during the pre, during, and post-event campaign
Social engagement from Chris Packham and Liz Bonnin
Thousands of new followers on the CCI social channels
186% increase in facebook event responses compared to the previous summit
Tools to continue to share the key messages, long beyond the event
This project was an absolute joy to be a part of. Both the expert team and the rich content were inspirational, leading to the creation of our very own Earth Optimism wild garden! It was fantastic to see a focus on post-event work in the brief too, this is an essential part of the event cycle that is often forgotten.
You can explore all of the Earth Optimism content here - we recommend Saving the Crane as your starting point!
“Jemma was absolutely key to the success of Earth Optimism Cambridge. Her wealth of experience proved invaluable throughout the whole process, guiding us through the event cycle to ensure we could attract our target audience, re-engage with them and then ensure content was accessible post-event. I look forward to working on future projects with her!”