WWF Earth Hour

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is the world’s largest conservation organization, with over five million supporters worldwide, working in more than 100 countries, and supporting around 3,000 conservation and environmental projects.

They approached Blue State to partner together on bringing a global fundraising component to Earth Hour for the first time since its origin almost two decades ago.

Earth Hour, the largest global grassroots climate change awareness campaign, was created and is managed by WWF but had never been fully leveraged for fundraising activities. We were tasked with creating a global fundraising proposition and toolkit in alignment with the 2024 identity “Give an Hour for earth.”

Co-creating at global scale

Earth Hour has numerous organizations participating, with varied brand awareness & salience across WWF offices. 

It was therefore important to strike a delicate balance between building brand awareness of WWF and maintaining integration within a global Earth Hour framework, whilst pulling key fundraising levers. 

We were keen to consider how such a challenge could bring together our team with global and WWF offices around the world to understand what had worked well so far and the benefit a fundraising ask could bring.

We wanted to form an idea that was moldable so offices could be empowered by the lens it offered and adapt it for the best need in their market. We sought to create a global cohesive narrative around how to best ask audiences to give in this context with a toolbox for offices to make it their own.

An opportunity to learn from audiences

As a global evolution to a tried and tested engagement moment, we recognized how it presented an opportunity to learn across four pillars:

• Fundraising potential: Could such a moment inspire audiences to give not just their time but a donation?
• Audience experience: Could WWF integrate fundraising, communications, and conservation goals into one campaign?
• Collaboration: Could we seek to build greater integration across teams, internationally, and at the office level?
• Global output: Could we form shareable fundraising assets and global learnings to add value for future moments?

Moving from brief and considerations into creation, we were excited to have participants across 16 teams and countries joining workshops, bringing insight and data, and  ensuring we had a collective creative forum and momentum to design our concept.

Our proposition upweighted the WWF branding to make a stronger fundraising call to action. The clock face design layer added urgency, creating stand out design on social feeds. It brought harmony between both Earth Hour and WWF allowing the two elements to co-exist with a new look and feel. 

As a clock template, this design allowed for sequential storytelling and, perhaps most importantly, was highly adaptable, allowing relevant animals or landscapes to be brought in. 

Alongside a brand-led route within the toolkit, we also offered an Earth-Hour centric route and, for those looking for a different giving proposition, the chance to give an hour of regeneration. 

Outside of assets, we included messaging guidance, perspective on last click creative testing, options for different journeys to take our audiences on, and a testing framework for audiences. 

A big part of forming a successful collaboration was in the forum approach we set up to design and refine the proposition. We wanted it to be clear that there was no such thing as too much feedback—we had multiple forums at a global scale for teams to weigh in and a tracker that allowed us to collate insights into themes that could steer the creative. 

Earth Hour in action

Over 12 countries included fundraising in their Earth Hour activities, including Australia, Brazil, Greece, Japan, UK, the US, and South Africa.

Building on the global approach and proposition we had shaped together, WWF International and participating markets also activated corporate sponsorship, ecommerce, peer-to-peer, and a schools fundraising component. 

The organisation identified potential in extending the Earth Hour initiative into a more sustained campaign, considering how it could be the first step in a two-step process (engagement and then conversion), building on audiences across the world who were aware and were previous Earth Hour engagers.  

Over six figures was raised around the world on the day itself.