Using Digital Marketing to Drive Petition Signatures for NGO, Climate Case Ireland

How we helped NGO, Climate Case Ireland gather over 17,000 signatures to present to the Irish government to hold them to account over their climate change policy.

Towards the latter part of 2018, we were approached by Patagonia to help them work with an NGO called Climate Case Ireland. They needed us to generate awareness around CCI’s campaign to take their own government to court over their insufficient climate change policy. In order to do this they needed to generate huge amounts of interest in the campaign and to drive petition signatures; a petition that CCI would present to the Irish Court.

Friends of the Irish Environment was established in 1997 when a group of environmentalists believed that the Irish government was not doing enough in order to adhere to European and Irish environmental laws. The latest project for this dedicated group being Climate Case Ireland.

Strategy

The first objective for this project was to generate the biggest impact of awareness possible via social advertising. We knew that we needed many voices, not just Patagonia’s and Climate Case Ireland’s, in order to make people pay attention.

We, therefore, set about pulling together a selection of relevant organisations; contributors with powerful voices who would be an authority on the subject matter and enrich the conversation. We teamed up with the likes of Friends of the Earth, Not Here Not Anywhere and the Irish Wildlife Trust and ran social adverts for the CCI campaign through their individual social channels, meaning we were able to reach the right kind of people through the trusted voice of an organisation they were familiar with.

This strategy meant that we could vastly expand the reach of the campaign and ensure that we were putting it in front of the most relevant audiences possible. With many of the contributors sharing similar themes and values there was, of course, an overlap in the people reached via the adverts, however, this simply worked to add more gravitas to the campaign allowing us to emphasise that this was something everyone was talking about.

Driving the petition

Following the initial generation of awareness for the campaign, we then focused our efforts on generating petition signatures with social media advertising. The foundations we laid during the first phase of the project allowed us to re-target petition ads to those that were the most engaged with the cause and therefore most likely to show their support. We also targeted individuals who hadn’t yet been reached by the campaign but had very similar interests to those who engaged with it during the initial phase of promotion. Using a combination of creative, including court date event ads, evocative imagery of CCI campaigners and a comical video from comedian Maeve Higgins, we urged viewers to click through to the CCI website and sign the petition in the run-up to the court date in January.

The Results?

On the 22nd of January 2019 the Four Room Court in Ireland saw a packed out courtroom with supporters sitting on the floor and ‘festival-vibe’ in the public gallery. The previous events and protests saw huge turnouts and the Climate Case Ireland campaign gathered over 17,000 signatures from supporters.

By collaborating with the right organisations we were able to utilise their highly engaged audiences and deliver Climate Case Ireland’s campaign to 195,729 individuals via social advertising. The benefits of working with multiple NGO’s in order to reach the right audience were clear, with ads creating a staggering amount of engagement; a total of 8,548 reactions, 841 comments and 860 shares. Overall the campaign generated 14,093 link clicks through to the Climate Case Ireland petition page. The petition ended up with 17,000 signatures and although we are still waiting on the verdict from the courts, the campaign was deemed a huge success by all involved.