Championing action on climate change across Wales

Brief  

Each year since Jan 2008, the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) has appointed six Climate Change Champions (CCCs), young people passionate about the environment who spend 12 months as advocates on this key issue. We were tasked with generating over 200 entries for the competition.

WAG is committed to making Wales a sustainable nation, with a 3% annual carbon emission reduction from 2011. Communicating this challenge to the public and specific stakeholders and winning their active support is a key priority.

Our role is to communicate complicated WAG policy messages in an easily understandable way to multiple audiences through the CCCs.

Actions

• Identifying media platforms and developing a programme of activity to generate profile for the CCCs to communicate messages to target audiences
   
• Planning and implementing memorable and interactive media launch events
   
• Negotiated monthly environmental advice columns/blogs for CCCs in target media
   
•  Maximised coverage with creative imagery involving key community groups, replicated across Wales with each CCC. Examples include:
• ‘Less Tea Vicar’ campaign where CCCs teamed up with church coffee mornings across Wales to talk about water-saving messages
  CCCs knitting woolly winter warmers with their local Women’s Institute as an alternative to turning up heating, saving energy and cash on bills
  
  
• Teaming up with BBC Radio 2 gardening expert Terry Walton and local allotment keepers to urge gardeners to think about water usage
• Teaming up with Royal Mail postmen to promote the benefits of cycling 

• Creating a bi-lingual pop single and video called Carbon Soldier/Milwr Carbon. This was written and recorded by the CCCs and released in December 2008 and relates the day of a typical young person making small changes to help the environment. Profits from sales went to help environmental programmes across Wales. The stunt received considerable broadcast and print coverage, as well as being spread virally on YouTube and Facebook and being downloadable to mobile phones.

Results

• Generated expectation-exceeding numbers of entries for three years running.
   
• Won support of stakeholders including Energy Saving Trust, Carbon Trust and Welsh Water, working together to maximise return from collective media relations efforts.
   
• The 2009 campaign won Gold in the Best Public Sector and the Best Use of Social Media categories at the 2009 CIPR Cymru Wales PRide Awards
   
• In addition the 2008 campaign won Silver Award in the best Public Sector at the 2008 PRide awards. The campaign was sufficiently eye-catching to be featured in the PR Week selection.

Don't take our word for it...

Hannah Emmott, Senior Communications Officer, Welsh Assembly Government said:

“Our first objective was to make ensure enough entries to make the programme  successful. WWPR’s regional approach gave us a useful geographical spread and a good number of entries. WWPR successfully integrated the work of the climate change champions with our wider climate change communication activities. WWPR managed to maintain media interest in the champions through fresh thinking and strong regional angles.”